Episode 154: Danse Macabre

Jason takes the helm of our artisanal editorial process today when KVM is called away at the last minute. It’s always our hope that our discussion will be instructive for both the poet and our listeners. Come along as we consider two poems from Zachary Kluckman. In the first, “The Lineated World,” the haunting ballroom image reminds Sam of the medieval era’s danse macabre . This lyrical, reflective poem is full of memento mori once we start looking, from moths to meringue to the scent (stench?) of the corpse flower . Jason appreciates how the use of enjambment torques the line and adds pressure to each sentence. The haunting continues in the second poem with a memorably spooky scarecrow. We discuss how this poem’s structure, with its longer line and single stanza, impacts the poem’s pacing. And we ponder stillness versus inertia. Something in the poem’s ending recalls Naomi Shihab Nye’s The Art of Disappearing . Join us as we throw thumbs. Thanks, as always, for listening. At the table: Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Lisa Zerkle, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer) Author Bio: Zachary Kluckman is an award-winning poet based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. An alumnus of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, he was selected by Oliver de la Paz as the winner of the 2024 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. Kluckman has been recognized with a Thomas Lux Scholarship to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the Button Poetry Short Form Poetry Award, and multiple local and national slam poetry honors. His work appears or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Little Patuxent Review, Arts & Letters, and Wesleyan University Press’ Dear Yusef. He is the author of three poetry collections. Author Website: Instagram: @physicalpoet Facebook: Zachary Kluckman The Lineated World Rain keeps trying to tell me something. Moths dissolve before I learn their language of light. Every dawn hundreds of bodies fall for another horizon. My sheets disappear into the walls when seen from the floor. Grandmother, when you made your lemon meringues, did you count the times you beat the eggs? Did you ever worry each was a second vanishing into the appetites of age? Were you jealous of the time you surrendered every holiday? Our family tree is a vertical line. A finger pointed up as if rebuking our loud blood. For disturbing the peace between trees. For scaring the fish away from our kitchen table. My uncle once took a man’s head off with a knife in a bar fight. It was self defense, but he chose to serve the full sentence because guilt is a worse enemy than time. What integrity I find in his decision. What integrity, in the stubborn silence of night blooming jasmine. The corpse plant making us wait a decade to suffer its scent of rot and growth. The moths return every night, an endless train of them. Numberless as shadows, humble servants of a need they have no tongue to name. Imagine dying. Imagine death as a ballroom full of footprints left trembling in autumn’s breath. A Broken Tooth Is a Whistle and in the gap where the enamel is missing, a smile falls through its own shadow. An owl is only wise because the night has hardened it against the moon. What are you willing to surrender for your next meal? When I spent the night plucking the eyes from the scarecrows with a scissor, mother said it's not them you fear, but the potential. The last thing she said before she took up her haunting. I wonder if that’s what led me to the bottle. I still see her sometimes in the dark bodies of hawks crossing the highway, when I finally abandon the farm for the moon. When I move in with you because you remind me of inertia, you say I love you. It's not that I don’t believe you, but magic leads to disappearance. How else would we know if it's working? Your voice is like whiskey, or an ocean whose name I have forgotten. Each sweeten the nerve where the tooth is missing. Both have tried to kill me more than once. In the mirror, while you search my face for cracks, I practice listening beneath the waves. If you listen hard enough, you lose weight from all the parts that go missing. Everywhere we go, I am at the foot of a lighthouse, but still I hear the corn waving from the past. Sometimes, what scares me feels the most like home. Some call this love. Three thousand poems away from you I still can’t explain the silence you catch me holding when no one is looking. When you ask me if I’m listening, my head is full of trees.

You can listen to Episode 154: Danse Macabre online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Episode 154: Danse Macabre is an episode from Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile by Painted Bride Quarterly.

This episode is 31:46 long.

This episode was published on Apr 15, 2026.

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