Just published 🔥 "What the Poet Taught Me," a blog post by Rachel Basch in memory of Baron Wormser (February 4, 1948–October 7, 2025). Read it at AGNI Online!👇

🔥NEW at AGNI Online🔥 "'The Border Moves Through Us': From Minneapolis, 2026," a scroll curated by Senior Poetry Editor @jkwondobbs.bsky.social. Read her introduction here👇 agnionline.bu.edu/blog/from-mi...

Boston peeps, join me at @agnimagazine.bsky.social's Bill Pierce at Papercuts Bookshop in JP Tuesday, February 10, for the paperback launch of What We Tried to Bury Grows Here (@twodollarradio.bsky.social).

Buildings I remembered from forty years ago were still locked onto corners like great rooks, orange and yellow hulks left over from a time when men wore white shirts and women wore polka-dot dresses. ~from "Bronx" by K. E. Duffin AGNI 61

Mounded snow faintly gray and sculpted into what seems the entire vocabulary of resignation. It shines in the one patch of sun, is lustered with the precipitate of the exhaust of turbine engines, the burnt carbons of Precambrian forests. ~from "Layover" by Robert Hass AGNI 40

The sea at Koh Samet is calm and clean at the cusp of winter, as the rainy season ends—it makes you want to sprawl on the sand, maybe dip your feet in the translucent, sun-filled water. ~from "Brittle" by Worapoj Panpong (translated from the Thai by Mui Poopoksakul) AGNI 94

Nietzsche. Rilke. Vilhelm Ekelund. If I had to come up with a single name for this triad, it might be The Exquisites: agnionline.bu.edu/conversation... #poetry #WritingCommmunity #booksky Via @agnimagazine.bsky.social

Spiritual tourists: the playboys of religions. agnionline.bu.edu/blog/spiritu... via @agnimagazine.bsky.social

Carl - reading another poem of yours in Agni journal yesterday felt like ‘falling into poetry’ as one would fall into the centre of a dahlia. And I can suddenly see why all my scores of seedling poems need warmth n water and encouraging to be less fragile - braver and more tender. Thank you.

Note the one long crease from brow to chin. Gaunt. Giacomettiish even, wouldn’t you say? Slivered cheeks sucked in as if some tart pill dandled on the tongue unseen. ~from "Self-Portrait as the Y-Axis" by Roy Mash AGNI Online

Chips of beach glass are not usually arranged discreetly but rather displayed in a jumble in decorative bowls or casually scattered in large, non-native clam shells. In bathrooms. In hallways. Mostly liminal spaces. ~from "Memo Re: Beach Glass" by Lia Purpura AGNI Online

She instructs me in her vacant way to identify the flower by looking inside the blossom— deep inside the blossom to spy its waxy alchemy, the sight of her pink skirt and pointed yellow feet flattened between two sheets ~from "Mother, Pressed" by Sarah Rose Nordgren AGNI 79

We were drunk at the beach club. High sun. We had been there hours. Picnic baskets. Thwack of flat sandals on the decking. The constant, constant shaking of martinis. Gimlets. Margaritas, even. ~from "High Sun" by Vanessa Cuti AGNI 92

A man is made of fifteen substances: bones, gristle, sinews, veins, arteries, strings, cords, skin, pannicles, hair, nails, grease, flesh, blood, and marrow within the bones ~from "Distortions on Boorde 2" by Charles Bardes, M.D. AGNI 79

ICYMI 👀 Our submission portal has re-opened! We look for writing that catches experience before the crusts of habit form—poetry and prose that resist ideas about what a certain kind of writing “should do.” Learn more👇 buff.ly/auE6ZFe

In elementary school I was cast as MLK for a short play on his life. I didn’t want the role, the pressure of being a focal point. I would’ve rather been a nondescript townsperson or even a tree. ~from "Stone of Hope" by Donald Quist 🔥 AGNI 102 🔥

AGNI @agnimagazine.bsky.social (Fiction Poetry Nonfiction; pays) opened to submissions https://duotrope.com... #amwriting

I want to see what you see when you look away from land, Every striation of the sky defined by color, the stationary Motions of the sea. ~from "The Vicarious Experience" by Pattiann Rogers AGNI 16

Here, where his body lay, gather up all the broken-stemmed flowers; photograph the water, that in the wind repeatedly makes for shore and misses— ~from "The Glade" by Carl Phillips AGNI 33

The galley stinks of sour milk. She has to shoulder the cabin door to budge it. The bed is lumpy. She has a strong sense that someone died here. They take stock. He likes the word “provisions.” ~from "Sea State" by Niall McArdle AGNI Online

The sea, far off, with its rooms and strangers. Where words recede under the muscle of tide. In clear moments, I remember your studio and you in the doorway. ~from "Six Values of Neutral Gray" by Sue Standing AGNI 27

Five hundred in cash and a pouch of rum was what we were each paid upon returning the flags. Yet another rally of the big leader behind us and yet another fruitful day of cheering done, we were desperate to return home. ~from "The Purple House" by Subhravanu Das 🔥AGNI 102🔥

So now these flies making a helmet on the skull of a dead raccoon at the road’s verge, this recurring dream of years that fall away, the pearl white moon with its barrenness and beauty ~from "Coda: Journey" by Doug Ramspeck AGNI Online

It’s coming on New Year’s and now it’s time. I’ve let it go so long, the cull, but enough is enough. Though even as I type that word I recognize that much will depend on what is deemed “enough.” ~from "Culling: A New Year’s Reflection" by Sven Birkerts AGNI Online

For me alone the book had been waiting untouched on its shelf since 1976. Forty-one years. The last time anyone checked it out—a certain Cheryl Mason—was in March of that year, the 19th to be exact. ~from "The Way It Went" by Nance Van Winckel AGNI Online

Fugitive, like a white bird, in tears she cries out to one killed by bombs: —I am on the sunlight, on the gravel; I will walk across the torrent’s spray. ~from "The Mad Woman" by Wasyl Barka (translated from the Ukrainian by Stash) AGNI 31/32

The snowbanks are up to my ankles at the curbs. Shop windows warm with checked woolen shirts. Christmas nears. Strangers stop and greet each other—in other words, They know each other but are strangers to me. ~from "My Poem of Halifax" by Jack Anderson AGNI 3

Singular in the void, you memorize my loss. Small winged thorns cling to your signature to lift you out of bounds. The season mourns. ~from "Poem in Answer to a Birthday Card with Photograph of Cedar Waxwings" by Madeline Defrees AGNI 4

Last weekend I took my daughter to a play put on by a local children’s theatre. She’s five and claims to like stories “with a lot of drama.” (Yes, she’s the daughter of a fiction writer.) ~from "Narrative Conviction" by Scott Nadelson AGNI Online

There was nothing I could have done— a flurry of blackbirds burst from the weeds at the edge of a field and one veered out into my wheel and went under. ~from "Blackbird" by C.K. Williams AGNI 61

Sky only a canvas with all the white and blue leached out of it, one immense something that no name will anchor. ~from "From the Train" by Eamon Grennan AGNI 63

Hell, then! Pandemonium’s walls have diamonds. We who lost our lovers on earth are welcome; all are welcome, mirrored among the angels lonely with pity. ~from "A History of Hell" by Agha Shahid Ali AGNI 53

🔥Reminder🔥 Our submission portal closes tomorrow at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time and won't reopen until January 15th! Send us writing that catches experience before the crusts of habit form—poetry and prose that resist ideas about what a certain kind of writing “should do.” buff.ly/r7UkLPy

He’d be furious. He’d say things he didn’t really mean, the way he always did when they fought. He’d say he couldn’t believe she could do this to him. How could she possibly do this to him? ~from "Sometimes She Wondered What Would Happen" by Anthony Varallo AGNI Online

Our building floated heavily through the cold On shifts of steam the raging coal-fed furnace Forced from the boiler’s hull. In showers of spark The trolleys flashed careening under our cornice. ~from "Window" by Robert Pinsky AGNI 29/30

We’d smoked sinsemilla. It was the green of a highlighter. My brain cells snapped and crackled. I was afraid and in love and alone. I’d jammed my finger in a socket and liked the juice. ~from "Heroes" by Mark Brown AGNI Online

All her songs sung finally to Frank, Frank fallen so many moons ago… Not that she hasn’t loved others since Frank, in fact taken lovers over and over, But that all her songs still go right away To our Frank. ~from "All Her Songs" by Liam Rector AGNI Online

You’ve been traveling to this room far away your entire life, and eating the Bible will light up your nerves until the neon lasso of the motel flickers and dies out once and for all. ~from "Eating the Bible" by Robert Vivian AGNI Online

What’s the use of promising? I have promised, a hundred times, but never returned. Wherever we go our cause is the same: to make a living and raise children. If a poem arises, it’s merely an accidental blessing. ~from "I Woke Up—Smiling" by Ha Jin AGNI 37

December is here, which means you have 15 days left to submit to AGNI! Our submission portal will be open until 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on December 15th—and then we'll be closed for a monthlong break. We look forward to reading your work! 🔥

A woman is not an apronful Of peaches Loosed on a slate drainboard Late in lackadaisical Sun, that sweet billiard break Of wobble and Rubbed cheeks. ~from "Bushel Basket" by Thomas Johnson AGNI 5/6

Today (and every day!) the AGNI team is grateful for the amazing community of readers that has supported us for 50+ years! Revisit our 50th anniversary celebration here!👇

We are living in red, in the creasework and blood. Admit it: we are living in something like red—cheek-pink calmed into evening, the lovers feeding off the skin-heat. ~from "Womandream" by Caroline Chavatel AGNI Online

There was she’s in a better place now. There was she would have loved this meal. There was the last time I saw you, you were only this big, and you helped me wash the car, do you remember, do you remember? ~from "The Reception" by Nathan Hill AGNI Online

Thoroughly enjoying my copy of @agnimagazine.bsky.social a haunting story sewn into the architecture the architecture of a forest by @niamhmaccabe.bsky.social and gorgeous art by Lia Purpura

Day took fire at her bidding, the stove down to coals, almost cold, bacon drippings in the coffee can white as ice. She would prod embers until flames bit at her fingers, glut the open mouth with fat wood and slam down the iron lid ~from "Hen" by James Malone Smith AGNI Online

Monster rubbed her ribs against my ankle and meowed like a beggar under hot sun. Matilda blew smoke in the hall and turned away. I was certain that woman hated me. ~from "Left Foot in a Lonely Guitar" by Stephen Christenson AGNI 5/6

July and August used to be the best month because that is when school would be out for the summer. Is real funny how they call it summer when Guyana is summer all year round, eh? But back then them thing didn’t matter. ~from "All That Hunger, All That Thirst" by Subraj Singh AGNI 98

🔥NEW at AGNI Online🔥 Poet @rosebudbenoni.bsky.social curated a scroll to mark the 130th anniversary of the discovery of the X-ray! "The X-Ray at 130" features writing by Rosebud, @diegobaez.bsky.social, Michael Brockley, and @dianacao.bsky.social. Read it here!👇

My AGNI Issue 102 has finally made it across the Atlantic 🌐 And what a cover, by the multi-talented Lia Purpura! Proud to have my story sitting among the fine works within. @agnimagazine.bsky.social