“I was driving home that afternoon / in some dilated condition of sensitivity / of the kind known only to certain heroic poets / and more or less almost everybody else” —Tony Hoagland, “Jazz” @triquarterlymag.bsky.social @graywolfpress.bsky.social

“Angela showed up with feathered hair, makeup, and a ribbon through the collar of her yellow oxford cloth shirt.” — @joannapenncooper.bsky.social, “Before the Invention of Regret” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-joan...

“I said I wanted my end / to be of my own making, / the way my friend Stan, / whose nickname / was Slumpie, took a rope / & tied it to his neck, / or Kelly who took a jar / of pills, to be an elegy / at the edge of one’s breath.” —Sean Thomas Dougherty, “The Years of Elegies”

“I don’t know what that means. / I’ve had some dark inkling / about the succinct finality; / even in class I pretended / to know what the poem was about / when I would discuss ekphrasis” —Tiana Clark, “The First Black Bachelorette” @kenyonreview.bsky.social @wspbooks.bsky.social

“something terrible happens to me: / it’s like The Manchurian Candidate, / when Lawrence Harvey suddenly realizes / the reason he’s been acting so strangely / is because he’s been brainwashed by Soviet agents” —George Bilgere, “Royalty” @upittpress.bsky.social newohioreview.org/2011/08/27/r...

“When it comes right down to it I’m a hopeless romantic. / And you, you are a scheming opportunistic leech. / And Chad is ‘the orphan.’ You follow me?” —Michael Earl Craig, “Honestly”

“I can’t help but think of that woman who said to him whom she considered // her savior: If thou hadst been there my brother had not died” —Marie Howe, “For Three Days”

“When Mother died / I thought: now I’ll have a death poem. / That was unforgivable // yet I’ve since forgiven myself / as sons are able to do / who’ve been loved by their mothers. // I stared into the coffin / knowing how long she’d live” —Stephen Dunn poets.org/poem/routine...

“Much was offered, it turns out, in 1978. / Men in ads were in no way confused: / they wanted the girl on the cover / of the May Playboy. / Inside, Anita Bryant railed against homosexual / teachers, took it to the soft-core street.” — @randallmann.bsky.social, “Playboy”

“Now the poet is talking about / his wife who he describes as ‘uneducated // but occasionally capable / of saying something profound, like: // I want you to touch me / like you want to know me’” —Kendra DeColo www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-kend...

“He took his mother’s hand once The day his infant sister died Just the two of them on the steps Of the church of Gesù Nuovo” —Stephen Kuusisto, “Empty Places” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“What about those women at the gym today, dry / as old sandwiches, and as lonely... / waiting as if for the opera conductor in his dirty tuxedo.” — @kimaddonizio.bsky.social, “Another Spring” www.bathmagg.com/kimaddonizio/

“a program he began / working on in the ninth grade while bouncing / around his room in his underpants / eating Corn Flakes, watching soft-core porn / on Cinemax, decorating his jean jacket / with cool Metallica and AC/DC patches” —Jason Bredle, “Anarchy” newworldwriting.net/backissues/2...

“Newly of-age at the pool hall bar / next to the Goodwill and the EPA superfund / site where a Sears sat rusting riverside / in West Lafayette, Indiana, we were girls / against boys at the table” —Emily Rosko, “Female Pleasure” @antiheroinchic.bsky.social heroinchic.weebly.com/blog/poetry-...

“If you’ve ever fallen asleep in your party dress / smoked out of a soft apple” — @jmaebarizo.bsky.social, “Women on the Verge” @tupelopress.bsky.social

“Wherever you’re from sucks, / and wherever you grew up sucks, / and everyone here lives in a converted / chocolate factory or deconsecrated church” —Erin Belieu ( @erinwriter.bsky.social ), “When at a Certain Party in NYC” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social 32poems.com/poem/erin-be...

“Harry the troglodyte, grounded / in a grave, who would hold his helmet up on the end / of his bayonet to check, on the hour, death’s weather” —Stanley Plumly, “Doughboys”

“You swoon inside a cathedral / of cuts and crush the light in your teeth. / Serrated, furnaced, blown to life / by a drunk man who held you with burned hands.” —Hadara Bar-Nadav, “Wine Glass” @tupelopress.bsky.social

“When the pipeline’s surveyors trespass I slash their tires. / I paint my face and disappear into the woods. / I fire rock salt through the trees.” —Michael McGriff, “Eminent Domain” @terrainorg.bsky.social @uarkpress.bsky.social www.terrain.org/2020/poetry/...

“We’ll look at each other / over brown rice and broccoli while the tape / of Buddhist chanting, the one we exercise by, // plays overhead like Chagall & violins & flying cows. / Later your bed will be a train in a French movie” —Robin Becker, “Great Expectations” @alicejamesbooks.bsky.social

🥹 Literature is life.

“Mother from the second story cried: / Don’t break her cherry blossoms! / Father tied our Doberman / around the elm, saying: / Don’t make the dog bark! / and sister watched forlornly / through a break in the fence” —Marilyn Chin, “Ode to Prized Koi and Baby Finches” @milkweededitions.bsky.social

“Already, formless / as her own reflection in the windshield glass, / their child drifts inside her, taking shape / first in the handful of trembling words / she will release when she breaks the news to him / days later” —Morri Creech, “Engine Work” @ksupress.bsky.social

“In school, I was elected most likely / to work in a tollbooth. // In the tollbooth, / I pay the drivers to proceed. // As a surgeon I spend / too many hours suturing corpses. // As a lover, I am / preoccupied with lighting.” —Andrea Cohen, “Why I Am a Ventriloquist” @salmonpoetry.bsky.social

“The window was cutting a key to the light. The window was unspelling a reptile’s breath. The window was wrecking itself against the mind’s sharpened edges, was staging that drama again and again.” — @jennifermilitello.bsky.social, “in the lab / ill” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-jenn...

“A blood-encrusted soprano is carried to the cauldron./Eleazer fetches water from the holy spring.//I know you are sometimes passionate./(The minstrel flees the monastery to rescue his king.)//I know you often slam the door.” — @carolinebirduk.bsky.social, “An Opera in One Act” @carcanet.bsky.social

“A cop, / flustered, tugged up his shorts, plunged / a needle into a pale thigh. He hissed / awake like a soda can. The paramedic / spoke slowly in his ear like a lover” —Steven Espada Dawson, “A River is a Body Running” @splitlipthemag.bsky.social splitlipthemag.com/poetry/0821/...

“the slow motion shake of the head the water / running down his chest, / all of this lit like a Poison video: / Cherry Pie his cutoffs his blond hair his air guitar crescendo” —Rebecca Hazelton, “My Husband” @lsupress.bsky.social

“I’ll kiss her in basements / where she takes a break from cutting boxes with a knife // to pull me in by the belt loops, and I’ll kiss her at rush hour / at night in Indiana where it’s still dangerous” — @sarahgreenpoet.bsky.social, “Lines on Trees” @uakronpress.bsky.social

“My impossible hair is no different here. / I know now, even American children / Adore me. Little Helen and Stanton / Take me on my walks; they are like / Cabbage hearts, so small and tough.” —David Keplinger, “Departure’s Particular Handkerchief”

“I’ve been waiting / for you, you say. / A scary movie called / The Baby starts. / The baby is levitating / above a pond. / You lick your hand / then put it in my pants. / You lick my hand / then put it in your pants.” —Zachary Schomburg, “The Baby” @blackoceanbooks.bsky.social

“It is the longing that creates the art, or the attempt at art. For that to happen, you need always to not quite be who, or where, you are.” —Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods

“These girls wear sex like lipstick. I think / this one’s the Undead. Heavy-lidded, / pawing the air like a drugged kitten, / stilettos piercing holes in the scuffed-up / linoleum.” —Melissa Stein, “Aquarium” @ampoetryreview.bsky.social voltagepoetry.com/2014/02/27/j...

“The oxy hardly works at all. The refrigerator / rings like a telephone. I hold her hand as another / nonhealer unwraps and anoints her flaming sores.” — @lesleymwheeler.bsky.social, “Extended Release” @tupelopress.bsky.social www.guernicamag.com/extended-rel...

Thanks for John Mulrooney for publishing this bibulous piece about Harold & Maude, Marilyn Monroe, and political euphemisms in @theartsfuse.bsky.social! artsfuse.org/329767/weekl...

“The poems, they / Come as they will. I have a human south of me who loves me, / And I have other ways of being. I will burst into flames. I will get up.” — @oregonsheds.bsky.social, “Failures of the Poets” @canariumbooks.bsky.social heavyfeatherreview.org/2023/01/10/a...

“The guard picks dead leaves from plants. / The sign over the table reads: / Do not take or touch anything on this table!” —Toi Derricotte, “In an Urban School” @upittpress.bsky.social upittpress.org/wp-content/u...

“Frau Instructor, // her gruesome armpit. / She points wildly / into the lap lane, yells to go faster. // The smell of chlorine / is the smell of hatred / of the body. // German isn’t scary. / Any language / shouted at you militaristically // sounds a little ugly” —Richie Hofmann, “Maze”

Read Frank O’Hara’s Collected in three days and preparing to do the same with Stanley Plumly. Feels kinda like speed-dating all the alternate-universe versions of the same person.

“Another thing, Franz, I despised: how you moved / through the Goethehaus with the sadness of a / cow. Of course the garden had gone on growing / since his death!” —Mary Ruefle, “Six Arguments with Kafka”

“Another thing, Franz, I despised: how you moved / through the Goethehaus with the sadness of a / cow. Of course the garden had gone on growing / since his death!” —Mary Ruefle, “Six Arguments with Kafka”

saw an incredible car today

“It was 1971, the north side filled with longhaired punks in white t-shirts riding banana seat bikes, tagging the backs of sheds, tossing bricks at passing cars.” —Mary Biddinger ( @marybid.bsky.social), “Everyone Has a Story About the Corner Bar” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-mary...

“He mostly wanted to talk about his soul, / how it was Russian, how it was superior / to mine (being American) and how Russians / in general have better souls.” —Jason Schneiderman, “Club Metro (St. Petersburg, Russia)” @fourwaybooks.bsky.social

“Girls marry young / In towns in the mountains. / They’re sent to the garden / For beets. They come to the table / With their hair gleaming, / Their breath missing. / In my book love is darker / Than cola. It can burn / A hole clean through you.” —C.D. Wright, “Falling Beasts”

“it will be so bad people will forget I ever wrote poetry / it will be so bad I should probably just give up and legally change my name to Westpac Family Day Tractor Victim #4” —Hera Lindsay Bird, “Everything is about to go wrong forever”

“Execution moon. / Hanging there // helpless. Try this / on for size. // The weatherman / never goes outside. / Grief, a garment / that shrinks each / wash. Scarecrow stuffed full / of hay, newspapers // hawking yesterday.” —Kevin Young, “All Souls” www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

“Dvorak, on his first day of work in the Austrian senate, / stole all the pencils and never came back. They were perfect, // he said, for composing music.” —Lisa Dordal, “Traveling” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-lisa...

“There in the dark oblong of the windshield / a field of wheat comes swarming toward you / and hicks with open arms welcome you / to Ely, its parlors filled with the little iambs / of Granny’s rocker” —Lynn Emanuel, “A Poem Like an Automobile Can Take You Anywhere” @illinoispress.bsky.social

“his giggle floated above all others / at the laughing academy / like cream on milk, nay, like xylophone notes / or voicemail from Satan: / ‘May I come over to frolic and gloat?’ / a presumably gorgeous / fastidious vandal” —Amy Gerstler “Fourteen Sonnets” www.relegationbooks.com/article/exce...