In trying, I am reminded, over and over again, that I need to stop orienting towards our executioners. Not merely in the explicit, the external, but in every facet of my being. To k!ll the cop in my head means to stop letting my anger overtake my capacity to function. —Em Roth

Last week, hope felt tangible. This week it is a discipline. This week it is a practice. And this letter hasn’t done a perfect job of that practice, has it? I guess it’s more real this way. But I’ll leave you with one thing that my heart has held lightly. —Em Roth

“A helicopter passed over us just the other day, dumping something across the fields.” (This happened to me last week—and they don’t grow potatoes around here.)

The other day I read this series of June Jordan's, which concludes with a fascinating, breathless travelogue at and around Pompeii. But I like this little rainy poem which speaks (in my reading) about solidarity and the ways we fail to realize it. She's the best.

When a flood recedes, the ground looks unfamiliar. Everything is out of place and all the witnesses can say is this is where the water was. —Liza Hudock

today is the release day for A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems (@animalheartpress.bsky.social)!! here is a poem from the book I’m particularly fond of—many, many thanks to all the folks who have preordered a copy already, it means the world to me & I’m so grateful for your kind support :’)

BREAKING: We're suing ICE for unlawfully targeting and arresting people who show up to court for their immigration hearings.

Seclusion of course means far from the world …no sounds of a market day or night I burn dry leaves in my stove to make tea and to patch my old robe I cut a cloud by the cliff lifetimes seldom fill a hundred years why suffer chasing profit and fame —The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse

This body lasts about as long as a bubble may as well let it go things don't often go as we wish who can step back doesn't worry we blossom and fade like flowers we gather and part like clouds I stopped thinking about the world a long time ago relaxing all day in a teetering hut …

“Not the family theater of / red-winged boats pulling at this paper continent ahead of us.”

Not that the dark world was removed or brightened, but each thing in it was slightly enlarged, and in so seeming became its true cameo self, a liquid thing, to be held in the hollow of the hand like a bird —Birthday boy John Ashbery

Mark Dunbar in Red Ogre (excerpt) — Coyotes and crows flop down, dream of foxfire and whatever feasts on wisteria, thistles and goldenrod – anything as mischievous as green corkscrew curls, the season’s hi- jinxes squirming like a bait ball across the lawn, collapsing in the swale.

Zebulon Huset in @ogre.red The rest of the poem: ogre.red/issues/2025-...

“The parking lot was all dappled in shadow with the white-black birch trees wafting overhead, cold and wispy and somewhat otherworldly. Orange pine needles and brown leaves on the blacktop, soft yellow grass shooting up in the cracks, and I thought of Bram and his fried blonde hair.”

‘At some point I awoke with someone crying in my ear, and in a lull between sobs I whispered, “Who is this?”’

“That’s how we spent every Saturday and Sunday that fall semester. Cartoons in the mornings, horror movies at night. Bram sick in bed. This was the pattern; this was the way. Bram would be Bram—multifaceted, rainbow, chameleon. And Melissa would be Melissa—tomboy, plain-faced, cracked-tooth Melissa”

Who is gonna pick all these up

Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things (2015)

It is fucking insane that we had a decade of people complaining about the dangers of cancel culture, and now literally hundreds of thousands of people are being purged from government jobs for ideological reasons, but that is not cancel culture.

The developers decided that was too complicated, so instead your supply withers and is eventually outpaced like green growth by gray or fresh water replenishment by datacenters or

recidivism in love

beware

Frank O’Hara

Wendell Berry, from the selected

The Seattle Art Fair is always so exhausting, but always well worth it!

“we’re located in the backwash of twin octagon jails”

Today's poem is "Dark Suite for My Country" by April Ossmann from We All Subscribers got to hear this poet from their inbox! www.versedaily.org/2025/darksui...

10 days left to apply!

Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. David Young

what is the name of the housed man who wrote the unhoused poem and got thrown out of polite society?

Hmm how can I get my friends @xvxblaisexvx.bsky.social and @tronotized.bsky.social to make me post more on here hmm

“the insects softly insecting”

I think I finally have an excuse to buy a meat cleaver but it’s not what you think (homemade corn ribs)

Am I really the only one who hates the MFA-ish tendency towards specificity for its own sake

M. C. Escher (1898-1972), “Puddle” (1952), woodcut in colours, on Japan paper, 32.3 x 24 cm (image).

What is up with all the fiction about bored white people? I don’t feel like there’s nearly as much poetry about bored white people

Weirdoposting readymade. I broke my hip and collar bone and it’s my LUMBAR that starts hurting, no thank you, but yes Dustin Hofmann get that bath

from Some Imagist Poets, 1915

Forgot the link! dreginald.com/index.php/is...

Mairead Case in Dreginald #24

Am I really the only one who hates the MFA-ish tendency towards specificity for its own sake

I think I finally have an excuse to buy a meat cleaver but it’s not what you think (homemade corn ribs)

it’s even more demoralizing when the history you’re repeating is history you were around for the first time

when i say the NYTimes deserves neither your money nor your respect, i also mean NYTimes cooking, NYTimes puzzles, crosswords, connections, and wordle, the wirecutter, the athletic, and all their podcasts. the NYtimes launders anti-trans bigotry; this is their victim-blaming victory lap

From @ruthawad.bsky.social's book, Set to Music a Wildfire: bookshop.org/a/862/9781930508538 #poem #writing #booksky

ALOCASIA is now open for applications for the ALOCASIA Microgrant for Queer Nature Writers! The recipient will receive $500 to help incubate their future creative endeavors. Deadline: July 31st, 2025.

The world keeps choosing destruction but I found an unappeasably gay Middle English lyric just now so there’s that

‘“She felt Bryher was what she called ‘the whole machine.’ Bryher was the wrapping around the live wire that was H.D.,” (Susan McCabe) says.’ 2022: dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories...

this is, again, not exactly ideal!

BREAKING: LA solidarity protesters in Austin are occupying JJ Pickle Federal Building, which houses local ICE processing center