“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...

“You don’t have to know how to live // It keeps happening either way // This morning on my walk I bypassed the cemetery in favor of the banks // They are all over downtown and very beautiful” — @heatherchristle.bsky.social, “Aubade” @southernreview.bsky.social

“you turning to ask / if I know who Brodsky is / as if Brodsky could be a first or last name, a pet / or an inanimate object / and I said no in the spirit of camaraderie” —Jason Bredle, “Camaraderie” @diodeeditions.bsky.social diodepoetry.com/v2n3/content...

“I had a job once / at Tollbooths of America, but / they let me go. Or more accurately, / I preferred the short-term pain / of leaving to the long-term injury / of staying in one place.” —Andrea Cohen, “Purchase” @fourwaybooks.bsky.social www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“The pain of trying to get it right is called maundering. / The pleasure is all mine. / Some say adjustable furniture is articulate. / No worthwhile poem should completely behave.” —Dobby Gibson, “Getting It Right” @theiowareview.bsky.social @graywolfpress.bsky.social

“my human apartment / stocked with toiletries and rations, // its earnest furniture and photographs // of my son and our mothers / who machined us inside themselves” — @jaswinderbolina.bsky.social, “The Bad News: A Film Noir” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“Sometimes I watch her from the door, adrift in her long uncombed hair, the smoke rising from her mouth like noir.” —Sean Thomas Dougherty, “My eleven-year-old daughter asks for a pill”

“there’s a statute of limitations on grief, like, certainly, / how someone died can be sad forever, but who can be sad / simply about the fact that Shakespeare, say, is dead” —Jason Schneiderman “In the End You Get Everything Back (Liza Minnelli)” @ampoetryreview.bsky.social @redhenpress.bsky.social

high elves are aloof and flighty, sylvan elves are depraved and cannibalistic and sylvanian elves have heavy rust belt accents and are forklift certified. know the difference!!!

“I’m sure I have it coming, and my wife, the Empress / of Timely Responses, will find a way. / The Greeks had a name for this sort / of back and forth. They called it the House / of Thebes.” —Jay Nebel, “Colorado” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-jay-...

The title, cover art, and ad copy for this book are like three cats stuffed in a bag.

“other times it’s like the city has no memory, / alive with breath and the onion tang of sweat. / You said once, cleverly, that history is just / a crime scene—and I laughed, too” —Morri Creech, “A Letter from Rome” hopkinsreview.com/features/a-l...

“should I say / you beat us / too / in the shower / in public / on the face / with boots / with a chair leg / chased Vicky / to cut her / awful hair / told us / get work done / more tits / less chin” — @estherwslin.bsky.social, “Up the Mountain Down the Fields” @alicejamesbooks.bsky.social

“All I wanted was to lie on the sofa / and read my book, / The Life of Nero, / and not think about the election” — @kevinprufer.bsky.social, “Election Night” @ampoetryreview.bsky.social @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“Your sadness gets a perfect score, / a 1600 on the GRE. / But if I had a gun, // I’d shoot your sadness through / the knee. Then the head.” —Erin Belieu (@erinwriter.bsky.social), “Perfect” @willowspringsmag.bsky.social @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“When the Nuremburg laws were introduced to Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, quiet Ottla suggested to Josef David that they divorce. He at first refused.” —Anne Carson, “Short Talk on Waterproofing” @yalereview.bsky.social yalereview.org/article/cars...

“I bring my knees up to my chest and pull the nightgown over them and from that position look through a book of circus freaks. I study Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy and feel a tugging kinship.” — @joannapenncooper.bsky.social, “The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis”

“Do you see the tree? / Its secrets grow as lemons. / Sometimes I pretend / I love my children more than / words—no one knows this but words.” — @victoriachang.bsky.social, “Tankas” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“In college, I kept buying posters of women lying down. / I didn’t notice until I was lying down / and saw them all at once.” —Laura Read, “In the same way we misunderstand the child ballerinas of Degas” archive.bloodorangereview.com/lauraread/in...

“the edible cut in fourths / because we all had to drive— / We gossiped like men about our / silly humiliations, the clock / pulling us further ahead / toward the stillness and our cars. / I miss being gay, I said” —Aaron Smith, “Fame” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-aaro...

“At the faculty party, I walk away from the conversation about Mr. Heidegger, whom I do not understand, toward one about furniture, which I think about all day. I wish I could make a chair” —Emily Skillings, “Prelude: A Lump of Pure Sound” @thesongcave.bsky.social epiphanyzine.com/features/202...

I just realized that being on social media is essentially the same as interacting with NPC villagers in a video game. --has a quest for you --will give you directions --will try to sell you something --insults you --cannot be spoken to --has an impossible secret that requires internet research

“Eileen’s father told her he’d chosen her mother / over another woman because he preferred her fellatio. // It was unthinkable, to me, to hear this from one’s father. / The word, too. Like fallacious, an SAT word: mistaken, as in a belief.” —Victoria Kornick, “Eileen”

“Here, Muybridge / proved their horses fly a moment. In their homes, they can’t / hear each other call from foyer to pool house. I am / jealous of this loneliness most of all” —Solmaz Sharif “Persistence of Vision: Gwendolyn Brooks” @graywolfpress.bsky.social www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58044/...

“In the dream I had cancer // You told your wife // The knowledge made her kind // The kind of knowledge one wants // We didn’t know what would kill us // On the train platform I watched the rats” —Nicole Callihan, “Aging” @saturnaliabooks.bsky.social

“When / flush with sequins you’re // incognito as bad air, / loose notes swarming // a honeyed asylum.”’ —Kendra DeColo, “Vajazzled” www.tupeloquarterly.com/vajazzled-by...

“Runninged to the toilet, / a spot of then a lot / of blood, cryinged on knees / then cryinged on knees / with a bucket then cryinged / curled naked in the tub, / ‘Stay out’ all night she said / behind locked door” —Bob Hicok, “The New Tense” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“The teens have gathered, because they are teens. / They wear brown shirts faded to beige, black / boots, low-slung jeans. The way they stand / is called jaunty. Cigarettes burn through / their words, smoke blows through their hair” —Wyn Cooper writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3F...

“She hopes the mother’s milk is good awhile longer, / and the woman up the road is still nursing. / But she remembers the neighbor / and the dead woman never got along.” —C.D. Wright, “Obedience of the Corpse” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social cdwrightpoet.com/poetry/obedi...

“This is not haiku. This
is more like fog and we’re
socked in and your body is invisible and right
across from me
simultaneously. How much ammo you got?
says one guy to another
in the cola-chip aisle
of the Food Lion.” —Erika Meitner (@rika99.bsky.social) poets.org/poem/non-lieux

“I had a fellowship but lived poorly On cheap beer and penny candy. Later, a career of killing time. But I have always been Shamelessly without guile. It’s a question of acquiring Money without the inheritance of chainmail.” —Cynthia Cruz, “Charity Balls” www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

“I was wearing the knit sweater with the purple whales and I was warm. A woman screamed: Your hair! Your sweater! A texture paradise! // Someone told me they’re calling the other Sasha at work White Sasha.” —Sasha Debevec-McKenney @triquarterlymag.bsky.social www.triquarterly.org/issue-160/i-...

“she did not know the man well, but had trusted him to smuggle her father across the border, the man pocketed the money, bought chocolates for his mistress from Belgium, and placed Margaret’s father on a train to Auschwitz.” —Spencer Reece, “Margaret” www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

“The fears of my mother, / And I their projectionist / Cranking the projector. // An evening of noir films. / The electric chair is in it, / And so are the cops.” —Charles Simic, “Roach Motel”

“Because the great Marat was killed in his bathtub by a girl. // Because after her execution, the examiners were disappointed she was a virgin. // Because isn’t that the most important fact.” —M. Cynthia Cheung, “Incarnation” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-m-cy...

“next thing she / knew, her husband was appointed bishop, / locking her into weeknights at church, / more casserole deliveries, / nine relatives flying in for her / daughter’s baptism.” —Marianne Kunkel, “Apostate Abecedarian”

“I will wash the dishes while he showers. / In the bedroom, the windows // will not be curtained. / Nothing makes them wince.” — @jamesallenhall.bsky.social, “A Name I Could Not Say Aloud” @fourwaybooks.bsky.social www.versedaily.org/2013/anameno...

“Sometimes I want to be taken into nothingness. / I want to be burned with the gypsy moths and bindweed. / Run to exhaustion with the wildebeest. / I don’t want this phone, I want to kill God.” —Bianca Stone, “Nature” @tinhouse.bsky.social www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

(61/61) “Say to the animal: heavy is / an apology inside the wind.” — @maidervang.bsky.social, “Death in Captivity, a Surrender” (Primordial) @graywolfpress.bsky.social #WOC #61Books61Days #TheSealeyChallenge #SeptWomenPoets

“close my hand around some smoke, / then open it and that smoke is gone / like the Russia of my childhood. / When I was a girl, / my father worked for the Cheka. / One morning, he forced my mother outside / in her torn nightgown.” —Ai, “The Émigré” @agnimagazine.bsky.social

(60/61) “The evening I saw death, / we ate eel braised / with bitter melon, drowned it / in cloudy broth / To this day the memory / how I tasted marrow / like an elegy frozen / in bone” — @sallywenmao.bsky.social, “Wet Market” (The Kingdom of Surfaces) @graywolfpress.bsky.social #WOC #61Books61Days

“No, Musetta’s / your gal, so Lil’ Kim put on your Queen of the Night gown, / the corset and headpiece with shooting stars, or your Lulu rags, / Jack the Ripper leading her to his knife, or your Lil’ Kim hot pants” —Barbara Hamby @upittpress.bsky.social poets.org/poem/ode-lil...

(59/61) “the brimstone and bile of this book left open / to Bosch's realm beneath the left hand of God, / my foxed legacy of human bonfire.” —Kimiko Hahn, “Unearthly Delights” (Foreign Bodies) W. W. Norton & Company #WOC #61Books61Days #TheSealeyChallenge #SeptWomenPoets

“The maple / tree that grows out / of his head is heavy / with the longing / of the dead. My brother’s / death is long, and heavy / as a year. I’ve mourned /my living brother all my life.” — @janehuffman.bsky.social, “Three Odes” poetrysociety.org/award-winner...

(58/61) “Witness, / if you can, listen: I slurped the frog-leg soup / gone bad. Held a brass spoon like a barrel / to my mouth.” —Vievee Francis, “Break Me and I’ll Sing” (The Shared World) @nupress.bsky.social #WOC #61Books61Days #TheSealeyChallenge #SeptWomenPoets

“There was laughter in the night, an unseasonable cold, and the beautiful sadness of lost roads and pine trees. I might tell Frank that I too have always lived near water and have seen the moon like a dead man in the river.” —Christopher Chambers, “What About This” @fencebooks.bsky.social

(57/61) “I knew this family was strange. What’s with this boy who loves flowers? The crowds of people whispered. Football players tied him up.” —Marianne Chan, “Winter Flowers in Biddle City” (Leaving Biddle City) @sarabandebooks.bsky.social #WOC #61Books61Days #TheSealeyChallenge #SeptWomenPoets