Michelle Bitting
Winter 2026 | Poetry
Rumpus Room
Here I will enact my good and evil
I will curse the dead and the living
The living mostly
I will also get down
Naked on all fours
And let my beloved take me
Our knees sinking deeper
Into the faux fur rug
About the ones I curse
I’ll say
They can be so nice
Ask anyone at their church
But what about the vitriol?
Late at night
Spit across wires and lines
Lumps of hidden spite
Of aging baggage lugged
Are camels nocturnal?
I saw one once
Bathing in the Arabian Sea
It was beautiful
Her rummaging around the waves
The water cool and cradling her
We must avoid a poison heart
We must fight for time in the rumpus
Where the wild things go
To sail and stomp away
And gnash their teeth
They are not afraid to cry
Some animals spit when they’re afraid
Things like death
The room where we’re sent with no dinner
I should care more I know
I should be more forgiving
They’ll be gone soon enough
While my Turkish lamp glows green
The pillows are soft
And I’ve got Nina Simone
On my retro Victrola
It spins a little slow
So she’s sounding extra sorrowful
I’m letting her swallow me
Like quicksand
Like the sea
Like a beautiful beast
Rolling in waves
She casts her spell
Her good wickedness
Her good song
I want it to last
My beloved bending
And kneeling again
And again for me
It will all be over soon enough
Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Grantee and is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Heavy Feather Review, Split Lip, National Poetry Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Spring, 2026. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.