“‘What you are describing,’ my teacher said, / ‘is a circle, and as they do not exist in the material realm, / it is not merely foolish to think of one, but actually / unethical.” —Jason Schneiderman, “The Last Form”

“Was it after I got caught / stealing a Snickers at Plaid Pantry? / Or when she found a stack of Hustlers / in my bedroom? After / my first or second stint in rehab / or when I said I hated her?” —Jay Nebel, “Smelling Nice” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-jay-...

Ariane: “Austen is so comforting.” Me: “Yes, there’s social opprobrium, but all the problems and solutions are artfully expressed.” Ariane: “Poverty is, ‘Oh no! We can only afford one or two servants!’” Me: “Alas, we cannot have the finest muslin!” Ariane: “We have but a cottage with ten rooms!”

“Now Ovid is weeping. Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. In his spare time he is teaching himself the local language (Getic) in order to compose in it an epic poem no one will ever read.” —Anne Carson mythologyofblue.tumblr.com/post/5383151...

“Certain odd little thrills: Speaking to the man behind the counter in between hiccups. Seized with the fleeting sudden thought, ‘I will move to the Florida Keys and grow my hair!’” — @joannapenncooper.bsky.social, “Heavy Bonnet” vinylpoetryandprose.com/2017/06/joan...

“To date briefly a banker, a lapsed Marxist, and hear him on the phone speaking in billions of dollars, its residue over the clear bulbs of his eyes, as he turns to look upon your nudity” —Solmaz Sharif, “The Master’s House” @graywolfpress.bsky.social www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

“I know exactly where I must go // to reach the good Starbucks and avoid the McDonalds // where high school students hand out gift cards // ‘From Jesus because he loves you’” —Kendra DeColo, “Isn’t ‘Food Court’ a Lovely Term” theaccountmagazine.com/article/deco...

The objective correlative of sadness is a full-size, unopened candy cane in the trash of a public bathroom.

“Anna and Stephanie went here, there, / while they went home to drink Molotov cocktails / as the plane went down. // I love you drunk in a sober mood. // Like putting a tux on to fight a fire.” —Bob Hicok, “Now We’re Not Getting Somewhere” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“The condemned man is rubbing his arms / thinking about someone / he used to be married to. / He reaches under the cot, touches the cold wire.” —C.D. Wright, “The night before the sentence is carried out” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social cdwrightpoet.com/poetry/the-n...

“Because when a man sees me / from the front and the back and still / shouts he wants to marry me, I think maybe, / maybe with him I could have a life.” —Sasha Debevec-McKenney, “I Like Being Catcalled When I’m Suicidal”

“He spends a long weekend in a rented studio apartment / above a garage some good ol’ boy has converted into a bar, / the lubricated dream of any man who’s ever / called himself ‘the panty dropper’” — @keithkopka.bsky.social, “Satisfaction Guaranteed” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-keit...

“She hands me a pair of jeans. Gray denim work shirt. I knew right away what it was but I wore it. I could smell the man’s body inside. When I put on the shirt her demeanor was different. More distant. Not meaner but sort of like under a spell.” — @kaicarlsonwee.bsky.social

“How are your teeth? / When I brush mine blood / drips down my chin / are you happy do you miss me / I will tell you / there is no one like you / your eyes are unbelievable / your secrets are more interesting than anyone / else’s you had an unhappy childhood / right?” —Peter Meinke, “Dear Reader”

“I remember a friend telling me once How he woke up in a long train Put out of service in a railroad yard. In the dining car the tables were all set With wine glasses and fresh flowers. He could see the moon’s lost white glove.” —Charles Simic, “Late Train”

“Praise the floor on which he lies, / my brother bent like a burnt spoon, / hands curled up to his chest, hands // stayed against turning himself to ash / for now.” — @jamesallenhall.bsky.social, “Wisdom” @fourwaybooks.bsky.social

“how did we get here / made of gingerbread in the oven / eaten by the mother / eaten by the wolf / my little pale nephew standing on the porch / explaining lava in the netherworld” — @biancatherosestone.bsky.social, “I’ll Tell You” @tinhouse.bsky.social

“sitting at your squalid Bartleby desk / and turning into a cockroach while proofreading / legislative bills commending beauty queens and putting potheads / in prison” —Barbara Hamby, “Ode to the Triple” @upittpress.bsky.social persimmontree.org/fall-2016/te...

“the ice / rink where music remains in 1982, nacho / machine on the brink of a calamitous fire / but somehow still producing its cheeses / which I will never be able to eat, thanks / to my ancestors who survived on boiled / stones” — @marybid.bsky.social psalteryandlyre.org/2019/12/30/g...

“Yeats wrote, ‘let them / take it,’ which I take / to mean his pain— // his resolute disguise— // ‘there’s [...] enterprise’ / he wrote, ‘In walking naked’ // in the pouring rain.” — @janehuffman.bsky.social “Revisions”

“At noon I teach my summer school class, / during which some significant Middle English poems / on the subject of mortality / are strenuously appreciated for one hour and fifty minutes” —George Bilgere, “Darkly Shifting Flux” @upittpress.bsky.social

“My hands are cold as I write this. / The skin of my face hurts. // Using my inhaler with the red cap, / shaking it first as if to wake the little god inside, / I suck the aerosol into my lungs like champagne.” —Tony Hoagland, “Bliss” @willowspringsmag.bsky.social

“another half-forgotten city, / wearing another man’s rags— / a scene he might have written: / streets snaking around him, / steaming and sulphurous, / rain dirty as it left the sky— / one last maze before the foothills of hell” —Nicholas Christopher, “Walt Whitman at the Reburial of Poe”

“Martin Buber bores you. / Oklahoma bores you. Moses bores you. // Dead flowers on your desk excite you. / Rain excites you. And your sister’s lacerated leg is all you’ll // Hear of at the breakfast table!” —Norman Dubie, “The Infant”

“Take me somewhere with romantic tension. / I’m so tired of these lukewarm bars / full of lukewarm men and their screenplays. // I have always been a lonely starlet / in a haunted hotel.” —Jessica Abughattas, “Musso’s” @uarkpress.bsky.social

“Night is closing on our small backyard, / and the bats ring the sky / in widening schools of black scrap.” —Rebecca Hazelton, “The Husband at Rest” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-rebe...

“In high school, domestic terrorism was ‘real’ terrorism’s baby cousin. It was a white teenager launching candy at strangers. It was a white guy bringing a gun to school, but probably not our white guys” — @ruthmadievsky.bsky.social, “In High School” @therumpus.net therumpus.net/2020/04/27/n...

“He was / a little taller than me: a young man // but grown, himself by then, / done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet, // rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold / and running water.” —Marie Howe, “The Gate” www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50979/...

“You had a yeast infection. You weren’t in the mood, that old euphemism. You went with your boyfriend, the Deadhead, to the Paterson Falls, near where you lived.” —Rosa Alcalá, “Not ‘What Can You Remember?’” @hopkinsreview.bsky.social @coffeehousepress.bsky.social hopkinsreview.com/features/you...

“you, as you later confessed, / wanted to speak about Gorbachev, / the little map on his balding head, / and how that map was the secret / but obvious key to how people live / exiled in their own country.” —Stephen Dunn, “Nearing Midnight at the Century Club”

“There is something about falling when / you’re blind, a kind of synesthesia occurs, // I fell slowly into a cold paradise of blue. / It was like falling into the world in the birth wind.” —Stephen Kuusisto, “Letter to Borges from Houston, Texas” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“It’s so hard / to be someone’s Anything. You walk all this way through the woods / not being eaten just to get eaten in the warm cabin, the one that smells faintly / sweet” —Jeff Whitney, “Hero’s Journey” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-jeff...

“There was nothing in those notebooks // that needed protection. Nothing private / of the great poet ferried from the otherworld. / All we learned was that he had terrible handwriting.” — @paisleyrekdal.bsky.social @ugapress.bsky.social sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2019/02/...

With very rare exceptions, it seems like the Gods of Poetry have decreed that you can have end rhymes, or you can have naturalistic sentence structure, but you can’t have both.

“Welcome to the abattoir. / The opera is ending soon. / Get a taste of this raspberry tart / before the bad odor starts. / We’ll all get our ears pierced, then burst into tears.” —Kim Addonizio, “Aria Di Sorbetto” @oneart.bsky.social oneartpoetry.com/2024/08/16/t...

aesthetics is the overlap between "how did they do this" and "why are you like this"

“Napoleon Bonaparte: in exile: where he took to standing on the back of a turtle: (one sailors had brought to solve the entire loneness of the Atlantic Ocean)” —J.P. Dancing Bear, “Saint Helena August 10” @thelitpub.bsky.social www.thelitpub.com/reviews-inte...

The two most disastrous hungers in a creative career are for dignity and authority. There are some who also take these for the pillars of an academic career, and that’s a big part of why I chose to work outside the academy.

“a pair of my daughter’s jeans (washed and washed again, packed away for Goodwill), / I found old gum deep in the pocket and a tiny note folded so hard, the blue ink barely blurred: // I’m friends with mean girls and I feel like I’m drowning” —Jennifer Martelli, “Stone-colored Birds”

“I’ve had my nervous breakdown. I’ve had electric shock. // I’ve had my figurative lobotomy, courtesy of patriarchy / and the cops.” —Lise Goett, “Flame-Shirt Rag” @tupelopress.bsky.social

“We are / what was not hung, dumped, or flung / from the Zong, splashing and graveless, / lest you think the ocean a tombstone.” —Tiana Clark, “The First Black Bachelorette” @kenyonreview.bsky.social

“I saw he had circled in red / the word possess and wondered did he / think it was misspelled, or did he want / me to know his mind was taken / at the end” —David Keplinger, “Possess” poems.com/poem/possess/

“Contemporary ideologies, studded with hashtags / It’s like not being able to wear a sexy nurse outfit unless you apply for a sexy medical license / You have to take someone’s blood pressure with your skirt hiked up” —Hera Lindsay Bird, “Untitled 404”

“Katie Condon! Antiquity, antiquity! She sings of afterbirth & blood! / Today, the snarkiest poet since the discovery of fire invites you / to her home for a soy chai latte on the lawn!” — @ktcndn.bsky.social, “Book Blurb in the American Style”

“betraying / their own brothers and stepping in front / of trains that have come loose / from their tracks and instead of brakes / have two sad faced women / waving kerchiefs” — @rebeccaslehmann.bsky.social, “Two Lovers” @southernreview.bsky.social @upittpress.bsky.social

“Butch. / A monocle / dangled / in her razored // neckline; / she saw us all / for what / we were— // not a lick. / Sick / of suspect / looks, // of plague, / I walked / Paynes Prairie” @randallmann.bsky.social The Summer of 1996 @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social www.cortlandreview.com/issue-87/ran...

“Why crash the party on the astral plane? You’ll just be too tired to go to the real party later. Have you ever eaten Swedish meatballs at a dream party? They taste like your blanket because they are your blanket.” —Richard Siken @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social readwildness.com/38/siken-tab...

“Inside, I sit beside a plaster bust of Walt Whitman / who celebrated all sorts of men and women // but especially Peter Doyle who drove a streetcar / and sported an extremely attractive scar.” —Ron Koertge, “Waiting for the Library to Open” @redhenpress.bsky.social

“the night is dark and the knife / is dark, and Walt Whitman loves me, / Walt walks down to the sea and my / Edwardian earrings are of no help / to him now” —Mary Ruefle, “Hold that Thought” @ampoetryreview.bsky.social

“My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not / Especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned, / And skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary.“ —Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin” www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...