Seth Copeland

CONTACT:
Email: sethco14@gmail.com
Website:  https://linktr.ee/sethcopeland

BIO:
Seth Copeland grew up in Indiahoma, Oklahoma, graduating high school in a class of nineteen people. He holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. His poems have appeared in Puerto del Sol, Poet Lore, Yalobusha Review, Rust & Moth, and South Dakota Review, among others. He is the author of Instead of Sunshine (Bottlecap Press, 2026) and the digital chap Plug in the Mountain (Yavanika Press, 2023). Seth currently co-hosts the Tabi Po poetry series in Milwaukee and has edited petrichor, a digital archive of text and image, since 2016.

PUBLICATIONS:
Instead of Sunshine, (Bottle Cap Press, 2026)
Plug in the Muntain (Yavanika Press, 2023)

Poetry

from Crybaby Bridge

Keetonville

This one has it all: a thunderstorm, an upturned carriage,
a mother losing her footing. Whispers from the Boggy

Creek sludge bring us here—its spoor fogging the Verdigris,
snaking us into prairie suburb horror: powerline cameras,

neighborhood watch signs, cinder blocks and loose brush
blocking the old road that cracks and sloughs into the creek.

No midnight ghosts, but a deer jumps out and sends us into a ditch,
into a sheriff’s stare. Stranded Comanche County boys have no

friends this far north. Don’t hold my hand in front of…Come on
you know why…we count the disappeared whispering behind us.

He leaves us a stiff warning. We slink south to the bypassed
slice of Interstate 44 in Catoosa, the tags moonlight fluorescent:

gothcore lyrics, Squidward, tic-tac-toe, and the anarchy A along
a median that divides a buckled nowhere road. I see you,

grainy as a spirit, beckoning. Our arms sift each other solid.
and we burst into nimbus. A cry drips out of the night.

In Talihina, Bigfoot Likes Pabstcicles

Snaking up from scabby Big Cedar on Highway One, 
where the old monkish hills are steeped
in prayer, 
we say nothing, just spinning our wheels through
Choctaw Country 
in want of loving gods.
There are others
always there are others.
That keeps it from becoming something
our mothers can't live with, 
but our other language is bro & beer & bong rip philosophy
& right now we don't have 
the cash for that version of ourselves either.
leaving us tall wild ghosts haunted
in the woods
& there's
no honor in hunting cryptids; let a lonely body be.
When the guy at the diner that juts out of the gas station
says he lured one in w/ a 
sliced can of frozen PBR,
our first instinct is to try & set it free.
Nobody likes unfairness so we usually treat each other unfairly.
Our small powers over each other,
rare, random, hold together the wire at our throats
But this story ends as they all do:
Had 'im & lost 'im.
We drink to that. He does too, 
we just don't tell him.
Dusk. Sailing by Heavener
& their sham Viking stone. 
So many interesting lies here, stale coffee lore &
the ache smothered in our night ease back to men,
whatever that means, laughing and joking,
thumbslurring truth like a polaroid in the woods, 
a dream clogged as quartzite.