Jessy Randall

21 Recommended Poetry Repairs by Firepoem Tires
(a manifesto by Rob Carney, Scott Poole, and Jessy Randall)

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New Most-Likely-Tos
by Kate Northrop and Jessy Randall

Most likely to develop a fondness for tearing exactly along the edge of perforations

Most likely to pull over, most likely to use the word frisky, most likely to eat full-fat yogurt

Most likely to recount last night’s dream

Most likely to fill the house with tchotchkes of a certain animal: cow things, pig things, peacocks, beagles

Most likely to stand at the edge of roofs, most likely to insist on skinny-dipping in the pond

Most likely to break a thing –soap dish, towel rack— and yell at the dog, most likely to feel the urge to fall apart, the sunlight refusing

Most likely to talk enthusiastically of canning vegetables and/or previous addictive behavior

Most likely to trace his own face, in secret, with a found feather

Most likely to say, at least once, when settling into a car and buckling the seatbelt bloop bloop bloop

Most likely to like the smell of a cellar, or cigarette smoke, or cedar

Most likely to recommend meditation, most likely to sit next to you at dinner, most likely to email you afterward

Most likely to compliment your haircut

Most likely, in early morning, on a bike ride on a beach road, to cry out-loud I want to fuck this air!

Most likely to invoke Bartleby, the Scrivener

Most likely to bury her face in a handful of basil

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Rules of the Writing Colony Secret Game
by Kate Northrop and Jessy Randall*

Stay up so late it's like you're drunk

Find yourself wanting

Two minutes in the closet
will be uncomfortable

Burst into tears

Spend the night in someone else's cabin
by yourself

If you have seat warmers in your car
you are automatically excluded
or if you are tall

When all wishes are fulfilled,
come up with new, unfulfillable
wishes

*this game is not related to the secret game supposedly played at Yaddo and MacDowell about which we know nothing

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Rob Carney is the author of The Book of Sharks (Black Lawrence, 2018) and 88 Maps (Lost Horse, 2015, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award). In 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry.

Kate Northrop is the author of Clean (Persea, 2011) and Things are Disappearing Here (Persea, 2007, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award).

Scott Poole is the author of Hiding from Salesmen (Lost Horse, 2011) and The Cheap Seats (Lost Horse, 1998). He was the founding director of Wordstock, the Portland, Oregon, book festival.

Jessy Randall is the author of How to Tell If You Are Human: Diagram Poems (Pleiades, 2018) and A Day in Boyland (Ghost Road, 2007, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award).