Mike Bagwell writes poetry and fiction
A Collision of Soul in Midair from bottlecap press! Poem of Thanks: The High Priestess from ghost city press! and Poem of Thanks: A Court of Wands from Metatron Press.
This site collects various publications, including the work itself if the publication is now unavailable, as well as a full book, Or Else they are Trees, and various design and publication work.
It is also the internet home for the Ghost Harmonics reading series.
Mike Bagwell is a form of mutual antagonism towards the sky, a writer, and software engineer out of Philadelphia. He received an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence and has work published or forthcoming in Action Spectacle, ITERANT, Sprung Formal, Annulet, Texas Review, Tyger Quarterly, trampset, Heavy Feather Review, HAD, Bodega Magazine, THRUSH, and others. Some editors have kindly nominated him for a pushcart.
He is the author of the chapbooks Poem of Thanks: A Court of Wands (Metatron Press 2025), A Collision of Soul in Midair (Bottlecap Press 2023), Or Else they are Trees (El Aleph Press), and micros When We Look at Things We Steal their Color and Grow Heavy Under their Weight (Rinky Dink Press 2024) and Poem of Thanks: The High Priestess (Ghost City Press 2024).
He runs a reading and music series Ghost Harmonics in Philadelphia. Find him on this site, @low_gh0st, or playing dragons with his daughters.
from Poem of Thanks III
when I first searched pikuach nefesh / google thought I wanted a pikachu fish / and was perfectly pleased to oblige / with some cute pics
2 Poems in Secret Restaurant
Memory is not unlike a rowing motion / or digesting fake sugar / under a perfectly pine-branched evening.
Automaton in the Plenum Desert
We bad for machines. We can’t depend on fingers. / We can postcard into mock rainforests // but no one wants to tell / how hurt they really are.
2 Poems in OVER/EXPOSED
-I-reflect-sunlight-as-if-to-say-I-don’t-need-this-thank-you-but-you-can-have-it-back-maybe-I’ll-swim-out-far-enough-to-be-congruent-with-perspective-
A Poem in which I Avoid My Guilt
I have no authority to say anything. / I clap my hands and a cat runs out of the room. / This is magic. It is expensive, / but well within your means.
When We Look At Things We Steal Their Color and Grow Heavy Under Their Weight
Outside, the peaches catch fire. / I am all smoke and spiritual harm. / At 2pm, customers / struggle in like ants, / up one nostril, out the other. / It’s so intimate in here. Please / do not take anything, / it’s attached to my skin.
Night Terrors
Night opens on a hinge / howling and bellowing, / a long cold corridor of stars / consuming all.
Violence of Craft: Your Mouth is Moving Backwards by Juliet Cook
What form does violence take when it enters us? How does it announce itself? By what mechanisms, what symbols? Are these symbols themselves affected, or are they implicated? These are questions posed by Juliet Cook’s poetry chapbook
5 Poems at Eunoia Review
Maybe we are written by language / instead of the other way around: / we find ourselves crawling back into the egg / on shore and it’s the grammar alone / that keeps us moving.
Poetics of Place
Later, I am afraid of the way / my arms repeat themselves. / In a house / with the only window in the world, / a man destroying things / from their insides.
Baboon Moon
I’m practicing sun vowels. Hibernation, sun vowels, hibernation, sun vowels. Like how seasons are one way of breathing.
4 Poems in Winged Penny Review
We were working with a botched biopsy / of the twentieth century, so who could blame us?
2 Poems in Bullshit Lit
There’s splendid hunger in / these wantings. The field of desire / falls apart.
Ophelia
as if it were an inexhaustible hunger. / heavy heavy says the earth. / the ocean you were drowning in / could fit the palm of my hand.
Topology
I spend so long / in the same memory /that it snows
Poem with Many Things on Fire
Outlines suffer the pain of defining. Even this bit / between us catches the wind and wants nothing / more than to float away like a hair. And then does.
Carrying Water
Maybe the soul is joined to the body by deep pits of water: / you pull feathers out of your mouth / and walk around a crowded airport
Light Works its Way through the Body Slowly
you said the body / is the spatial architecture of the idea / that night your soul in my chest / a pale blue cylinder / trembling a great distance away
2 Poems from Graphic Violence Lit
It was all body language and occasional / waiting until we died. It was all / hoodwink samsara. When we encounter // we mean against meaning.
2 Poems from BRUISER
Today, the moon is a unicycle / and it is supposed to be a joke. / We take off west and invent forgiveness / using each other’s pale light.