riojones7, Instapoet

When mindlessly rabbit hole-ing through Instagram feeds, I found these beautiful typewritten Federico García Lorca-reminiscent poems. Each one is a distilled emotion, a tightly-packed newly budding rose. It's fun to imagine the poet standing in front of his gas stove (probably somewhere in Brooklyn) burning the edges of these evocations.     

To read more, visit his Instagram feed @ riojones7. Or, what fun: if you'd like to request a poem, email him at riojonespoetry [at] gmail.com. I think I'm going to do so right now. 

Matthew Di Paoli - Other Forms of Life

In "Other Forms of Life," a grandfather and a grandson search for the answer to the mystery of how a bag full of bloody dear tails wound up on the grandfather's doorstep. As someone who's recently lost a grandfather, the pedestrian simplicity of this grandfather/grandson's search (they wait in line, stand on sideways, talk with the drycleaner) -- and its lack of a fulfilling conclusion for the grandfather -- pulled at my heartstrings.  

Read the full story at Carte Blanche.  

Mike Lacher - IN WHICH I FIX MY GIRLFRIEND’S GRANDPARENTS’ WIFI AND AM HAILED AS A CONQUERING HERO.

First published in McSweeney's, this 8-bit Beowulf-inspired story will make you chuckle at the expense of thine poor confused grandparents. Lo, 'tis a joy to be unafraid of the router -- nay, the electrical outlet -- though they be shrouded in the fogs of mystery.

Steve Roggenbuck - make something beautiful before you are dead

Steve Roggenbuck, the Internet's version of Whitman, has made me think poetry may not actually be dead to anyone other than poets? Some lines from his awesome/weird YouTube poem, make something beautiful before you are dead:

"this is a fucked up tree; this is three trees coming out of the same tree ...

I want to kiss you on the baseball field in the middle of the night ...

back in my grandfather's day, they didn't have yolo! ...

guess who you can't hug when you're dead ... everyone! ...

you are literally gonna die; make something beautiful before you are dead ...

hey fricker, guess what? we're both alive at the same time!"