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Ted Mico began his writing career in London as Features editor at the weekly music paper Melody Maker. His poetry has recently featured in Cincinnati Review, High Window Press, Ilanot Review, Lumina, Slipstream, Arboreal, Cordite Review, Blood & Bourbon, and was a finalist for the 2025 Yellowwood Poetry Prize. He’s edited three books of non-fiction and is now a regular at the legendary Beyond Baroque poetry workshop in Venice, California. His dog is named Larkin.

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Ted Mico: Eight poems

RIGHT AFTER ANNE CARSON’S LECTURE ON HOMER

It’s winter when we pull over and Troy’s still falling.
After Carson’s lecture, the cab we hailed
is a prophesy of this cab. A wife beyond pregnant,

we couldn’t make it to hospital. A slather of newborns
over cab seats at 11th and Lex. The meter running
with blood and afterbirth. New York at war

with itself, sirens and a backseat chorus baby loud
with beauty, cruelty, poetry. Hard to tell them apart.
Poem, from the Greek poiein meaning to make,

as in we make three-lined stanzas from mouthfuls
broken, fixed, then broke again. The oracle warned us:
we must save our babies from the Greek paradox of it all.

We name our daughters Anne Carson, Ann Carson,
An Carson so we can tell them apart in print
for Carson taught us Greek love is a three-way street:

the lover, the loved, and the absence of love.
Born with ruled notebooks in hand, we enter
three Annes into witness protection to save them

from our own predictions. Their names have changed,
but the given ones are still visible, leaching through
each indigo dress they wear, every page they will write.

(First pubished in Yalobusha Review.)

HOUSE OF A THOUSAND TURTLES
Large hailstones were hurled against him; like onrushing turtles
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx– Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth

On a good day I am not treating my death with dying.
Bad days, the bath keeps rising, spilling hot
over hallway floors. A thousand turtles splash

and scuttle around me, their identical
thousand-year stares form a moving carpet
of autumn greens and browns. These colors

may not be exactly true, my recall is a shell
that fades as gin takes the edge off my Percocet.
The cosmos spins turtles all the way down

to my chemical stain on the floor and I die again
when memories of me subside. The earth boils
with burn-off from forever slicks, and in every house,

the sound of falling men and women. Like all
intentions, the good turtles look the same as the bad
and I set this problem to music played by my thousand

lyres-in-waiting. No one’s left to hear me surrounded
by so many loose-necked reptiles sculling
the hall like a cold lava flow. My armor hardens

when they abandon good and bad ideas in the hallway
and leave as happiness always does – a thousand
slow homes moving west where it’s cooler.

(First pubished by Yalobusha Review.)

UNDOCUMENTED

Geography splutters
xxxxxxa language of the dead
speaking
xxxxxxunder giant suns
half-life kids
xxxxxxstarved stateless
boarding unfit dinghies
xxxxxxoutboard motors failing
mostly at sea
xxxxxxwithout boundaries
adrift at the foam line
xxxxxxthey’re safer than most
back at school
xxxxxxwhere soldiers half
their age
xxxxxxwrench out milk teeth –
half-life lessons
xxxxxxtaught with live rounds.

Preserved in slick
xxxxxxhydrocarbons
territory mostly preaches
xxxxxxthe keystone to empire
sometimes mistaken
xxxxxxfor teratology –
the study of monsters.
xxxxxxTwo words spelt
with soft fringes touching
xxxxxxmost questions like
is it a sign
xxxxxxwhen Zodiacs capsize?
The long way to go
xxxxxxdragged down
by the weight of waiting
most uninvited guests
xxxxxxforever guests
discard difficult names
xxxxxxat the border.
Documents underwater
xxxxxxmakes filing
the right paperwork
xxxxxxan exercise
in pulling teeth.

Sea currents shift
xxxxxxmost discharged
Fanta bottles
xxxxxxunder the stars
washes up on the sand.
xxxxxxThey’re not the brightest
objects on beaches
xxxxxxand the taste of drowning
at dinnertime
xxxxxxmakes monsters of us all.
It takes thirty-five
xxxxxxempty lifejackets
xxxxxxto spell the word
visa.

MY BEQUEST, JESSE

I gift to you my waistcoat made of excuses,
xxxxxxmy three-hundred-piece hippo collection,
a love of saffron, all the first edition Larkins, sobriety,

a hard-to-find orchid and my two favorite words: articulation
xxxxxxand oblong. Try to avoid my stammering – I swallowed
too many consonants as a kid and they repeat

like a machine-gun when I’m afraid. Steer clear
xxxxxxof the stale air between skyscrapers on 34rd St
where I found that silver hair grip on the street

and gave it you to fill in the difficult part of sentences
xxxxxxafter I lost my kung-fu grip waiting for chest x-rays.
Try not to hold seven syllable prescriptions

under your tongue for too long –
xxxxxxthis little pill went off-market, this one
to take while operating heavy machinery.

A red one to allow beauty and bleach to exist
xxxxxxat the same time, a blue one to ward of
the bell witch or night collector seeping into your day.

This envelope also contains passwords
xxxxxxto all my accounts. Drain wisely, take this queen-size
sheet and project your new world over my body.

Watch the land flourish with exotic names and flowers
xxxxxxuntil you realize there’re no words for it but love.
Umbilically yours, Dada.

SPEAK, DAMN IT

Just like you, Edward, leaving and not
leaving. Your wife, your wife, your wife

and I carry out your dying wishes
to the letter. The four of us wade

your favorite lagoon, sackful of recall
in one hand; the other nursing hooch.

Nil by mouth were the instructions
so we flood the lake with embalming liquor

just as you’d asked, remove heavy organs,
and pack you full of crisp dried leaves.

The wives wear semi-quavers for smiles,
giddy from the stench of white lightning.

We comb your jet wet hair, pour a toast
and watch you glide across the lake

in memoriam, in waders, in your Sunday best
cufflinks beneath a shudder of smoke trees.

Only your insides, Edward, answer the ruckus
of backwoods rustling you always loved.

THE SECONDS WE MISSED BETWEEEN LIGHTNING AND THUNDER

Mouth warm with current, my gasp
xxxxxxalmost blows the storm right out of us.
We two super-conductors invite discharge
into our house before the next bellow.

Each contact more charged than the last
xxxxxxour ruin and wonder
pose naked as the gift of electricity.
One one thousand, two one thousand…

Boom! Your eyes lit wide as weapons,
xxxxxxmy fingers zigzag
across your belly and down but
I can’t touch you without blackouts.

Struck through me, every bolt takes a life now
xxxxxxwe’re too much furious sky for each other.
Forgive my currents? You try to say Yes
but only make the sound of rain.

IN THE PARABLE OF TONGUES

sex never means the same place
twice. New tongues scroll down
where only explorers’ hands
had visited that first time
uneasy there
xxxxxxxxxxxnot there.

Wondering
xxxxxxkeeps us
naked and salted with secrets.
Hectic breath
xxxxxxand new lips stitched open
xxxxxxhot and clammy
licking proper names
xxxxxxxxxxxxoff each other.

Slower curves
this second time – all
paradise inside your mouth,
knees more bent,
xxxxxxinside thighs groaning
xxxxxxmore familiar
with sheets rucked in rhythm.
xxxxxxOur big body motion.
A second dampness
xxxxxxto pin down,
xxxxxxstop anything growing
into next year
where blood settles.

Still dressed in foreplay,
we are wet
xxxxxxxxxxxxwith sadness
a third time
because making almost love
three times means it can
be done a fourth and more
as forever we repeat
what we love to do before
xxxxxxwe destroy it
xxxxxxwith repetition.

THE RULE OF THREE

Hot sticky noise bores through
thin-crust Manhattan walls,
my ex straddling some cuntstruck boy
next door, an overabundance of pounding
cock and craving always within earshot.

xxxxxxDon’t talk, use your tongue!
she yells with so much porn enthusiasm
I can hear their sweat beads drop.
xxxxxxNot yet, she instructs
but my hand’s already a singing choir.

I upload ocean sunsets
to hurry their day to the finish, tag her,
tag him, them – with each headboard slam,
xxxxxxI post an uglier baby pic
prophesizing their soiled future.

Their rapture fits neatly
xxxxxxbetween my legs, my head
erupting with gunpowder plots.
I post a ménage à trois
because my hopes sleep three comfortably,

because I hear three of everything
since my fall from the fire escape –
three bodies, three dumpsters, three
hymns, the madness of three hands,
xxxxxxleft hands, grabbing.

DUST COLLECTOR

This morning, a paper cut
from opening too many
past due bills. I need two nightshifts
for every sunrise just to keep up
with the rent and runaway debt.
The air is thick with swearing
as I look for forgiveness
in the mail. None found.
The envelope’s blood smears
match the redness of those
Must-Pay-In-Full demands.

Another red-letter day:
my front door split
by a bailiff’s steel-capped boot,
eviction notice underfoot.
I’m escorted out of the flat,
even the deadest skin’s now
homeless, what’s left
of my furniture piled high
against the curb. Outdoor living –
my new net worth adds up
to less than the dust that made me.

From my park bench, I watch
a tiger lily gives birth to tiger cubs.
The last deer in the world leaps
against the wind but is pushed
back into the litter.
A tastes-too-good moment,
the cubs pounce and rip and rip.
There’s no place for me here
in the red, my dust collects
over the remains of flower, tiger,
and the ripping world.

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