Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: We’re glad to feature a poem from Rob Macaisa Colgate’s debut poetry collection, Hardly Creatures, out this week with Tin House Books. It brings together a spoken monologue, an enactment of the kinds of listening that can happen, and incredible wordplay.
Writer’s Statement
I write toward disabled poems—not necessarily poems about disability, but poems that are themselves disabled. When we refer to “body paragraphs” or “the body of a text,” we recognize language as a body, and must therefore recognize its inherent capacity to be disabled, and for this to be a natural source of wonder rather than a socially imposed pathology. Ceaselessly, I am curious about what happens if we allow language its disability, if we embrace access and all its imperfection, if we take care of our poems so that they might live comfortably fractured instead of trying to cure them into seamlessness. I have to believe the sublime exists in mishearing, misperceiving, mistaking.
Listen to Colgate read the poem:
Eli Plays Along
I. Phone Call
Hey, where are you? Hey, breathe, it’s okay, I’m not upset. No, I’m not trying to make you come home, I just felt like hanging out with my boyfriend! Where are you, I could come and—oh, wow, really? That sounds really unfair of him to make you do that. And so that is the reason you left, to find him? No, I’m not mad at him. No, I wouldn’t let him hurt me, it’s okay for you to tell me. Here, why don’t I help you come find him, and I can bring a flashlight. Yes, I’d love to sing with you, that’s very smart since you know it will keep you safe. I’ll even bring the cards and some Sprite Zero and after we find him we can all have a picnic together, I bet he’ll like that. Yes, we can take the train home instead of a car, I know you love a night train. No, I’d never be mad, I love you when you’re like this. After nights like these you twitch in your sleep, which means I get lots of extra squeezes, it’s my favorite. Where are you, angel? Take your time. Take your time, angel. Oh, great, this will be so fun, I’ve never been to that park at this time of night! I bet the floodlights are beautiful. Are they beautiful? Tell me what floodlights you can see, beautiful.
II. CART Transcription
Haywire art you. Day brief—it’s okay. Hymn ought up, sad no. Hymn ought dry into my achy. Oh, come home. Eye just fell, the light hanging, outwit my poise. Friend, wear art. You, I, good command. Awhile reeling—that sound. Real lean fare, a vim, tum ache, yuzu that. Dance soda, dizz the reeds in. You lift to find dim. No whim not made. At hymnal, eye wooden to lit hymn, herd meet. Soak A for you too. Till me, hear wide own tie. Hell pew cum fine. Dim in dye can. Preen, guff-laugh, slight yeah. Side love, two seeing width youth adds fairies. Mart sins, you no wit; whelk heap you save. Aisle eve in burying thick hearts. Handsome spry tizz hero, handoff tear. Wi-Fi and dim, weekend awl half. A pick, neck to gather. I bet hell like that. Yes weekend ache, the train omen steady fucker. I know you’ll. Often height rain. Know widen. Ever be. Mad I love you. Win. You’re like this. Have tern heights, slight these. You to wish inner sleep, wish mean sigh get. Lots of fix, trust queasies. Sits my fake veer. It wear—are you? Wane jeweled. Ache your time. Day cure time. Angel. O gray to thistle bees, o fun ivy. Never be in-tooth, at perk, at distime. Of night, I bed. The flood. Lie to sore be you. Too full, are they be you? Too full till me. What flood! Lights you can see! Be you—too full.
Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025) and the verse drama My Love Is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). A 2025 NEA and 2024 Ruth Lilly Fellow, he is the managing poetry editor at Foglifter and lives in Chicago.
