“Suppose there was an ice cube left over from the Napoleonic Wars, / & I’d bought it at auction” —Mathias Svalina, “She Uses Her Pinky Finger When She Types”

“I had to be introduced to The Man. / He was around before 1977. / I just couldn’t see him, like air / or welfare.” —Adrian Matejka, “English B” @alicejamesbooks.bsky.social www.fishousepoems.org/english-b/

“Because I’m afraid of change, I wear the quilted pants emblazoned with pale peach skulls and crossbones.” —Julia Story, “Post Moxie” @sarabandebooks.bsky.social

“you’re sure you’re the only one to go / deaf to the world’s clatter, the cartwheeling / cheerleaders, angels hosannaing at Armageddon: / Rah-rah, O blessèd among Man” —Jim Elledge, “To One of Two Boys on a Bench”

“Pin all yr hopes, lay all yr love, etc. // Which means the fish that live / in a plastic bag think the edges // of the world pucker.” —Matthea Harvey, “Life-size is What We Are” @graywolfpress.bsky.social

“Look it’s nighttime again // I’ve been standing in front of a mirror for a hundred years // My glass clothes tossed across the bed // Trying things on trying things off” —Michael Dickman, “Be More Beautiful” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“Today abstracted / as a glass of milk / forgotten by a kid who went / into this interminable / rain to play” —Matthew Zapruder, “Dream Job” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/mat...

“You’d say not so bad and rub my belly, / not after me really, just being sweet, / and I always thought I’d die a little / because you smelt like burnt leaves or woodsmoke.” —James L. White, “Making Love to Myself” @graywolfpress.bsky.social

“My brother stood / in the refrigerator light // drinking milk that poured / out of his head // through thick black curls / down his back into a puddle // growing larger around him.” —Matt Rasmussen, “After Suicide” @lsupress.bsky.social

“But this / is not for you: / eighteen, and dazed on Pakistani hash, I’m reading / in a commune bedroom / The Dream Songs for the first of endless times that year.” —David Wojahn, “A Fifteenth Anniversary: John Berryman” @upittpress.bsky.social

“I’m okay with my choices. Take today for example. I worked on Tom (old, crippled, needs therapeutic shoes), Jimmy (unsure about the world, collapses violently when he hears loud noises, likes to cut himself)” —Michael Earl Craig, “Today, for Example”

“When she gets home she’ll apply it with great lingering care / before moving into her parlor to play 78 records and drink gin-and-tonics / beside her homemade altar to James Madison.” —David Berman poets.org/poem/charm-530

“Paros / was famous for its lemons, / so the Turks beheaded fifty men / on a barge in the harbor / and tossed their bodies to the fish.” —Nicholas Christopher, “A Short History of the Island of Butterflies”

“Mrs. Floyd Baumgardner, our skunk-haired / Daughters of the Confederacy bibliophile, / clipped genitalia throughout the Renaissance” —Rodney Jones, “Nudes” @southernreview.bsky.social

“Sometimes all my childhood burns like a fever, / even my mother’s hand on my forehead / as she urges me to practice / the piano, as she tells me to drink the music / like blood” —Susan Mitchell, “Leaves That Grow Inward”

“Ophelia wrings her wet hair in the shower and asks Hamlet if he can turn the TV down. She shakes when she takes her pills, memorizes a rhyme: small one, red one, blue one, new one.” —Hannah Ahn, “Ophelia” @pitheadchapel.bsky.social pitheadchapel.com/ophelia/

“We / ate God’s body and died / in the ditches. Yer // man the toadstool sprung / up from the corpses, / same color as spuds” —R. T. Smith, “Mushrooms” @lsupress.bsky.social

“Sisters, don’t let sisters / ride the chandelier. / It’s just a Turkish tea set / with a drunk seductive chime / like the bell in the broken doll’s head / we loved to kick around.” —Tanya Larkin, “Acqua Alta” @saturnaliabooks.bsky.social

“Good news: you still won’t leave your wife for me, / but there is a horse tethered to the scaffolding // in front of my building and I think he might be mine.” —Leigh Stein, “Another Spectacular Day with Plentiful Sunshine” @melvillehouse.bsky.social

“I’ve read biographies, / Wilde and Robert Lowell, and fallen asleep / over a fallen hero lurching down a Paris boulevard, / talking his way to dinner or a drink, / unable to forget the vain and stupid boy // he allowed to ruin him.” —Mark Doty, “Demolition” @illinoispress.bsky.social

“a cart track to the / settlers’ graveyard. // Chipped, unnamed / baby graves, black // with mold, old lichen, / those phrases like fire // lanes through language / —I love you— // black hole left by / stone thrown” —Kate Colby, “Green Blind”

“My father hit my mother / and I didn’t run away. / Father beat my mother and I sat / there listening carefully. / G.I. Joes, in my room, on a December Saturday.” —Charles Kell, “Saturday Blues” www.poetriesinenglish.com/five-poems.h...

“I must have stayed for a long time / because when I came out on the other side, it was dim. It was evening. / A black wind paced at my shoulders. The moon had risen, and an elm stood / in its new pitch of light” —Christine Garren, “The Underpass” @uchicagopress.bsky.social

“A darkened porthole lit by the white, angular face // Of an old woman, or perhaps the boy beside her in the stuffy, / Hot compartment. Her hair is silver, & sweeps // Back off her forehead, onto her cold and bruised shoulders.” —David St. John, “Iris” poets.org/poem/iris

“Who doesn’t want to be visited by the dead, who doesn’t want / their dead father to rise like a cabbage moth from the zucchini bed? // This is something better not shared in public” —Martha Silano, “Don’t Make Me Grab You by the Rostrum” @eldiagram.bsky.social thediagram.com/26_1/silano....

Balsamic Confession

The same thing that torments us as writers (namely, the relative invisibility of our audience) is the same thing that protects us from the crippling self-consciousness of being watched by the Panopticon.

“the space-age materials that accompanied / our astronauts to the moon where they gazed / down like God in His infinite boredom / and wondered what their wives were doing.” —Ron Koertge, “Darkness Fell” @uarkpress.bsky.social

“I was a psychic for a long time before I started taking meds. I saw through things. After meds, I realized I was just another empath in a Denny’s, sinking onion rings in ranch dressing” —Richard Siken, “Mind Control” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social conjunctions.com/articles/cal...

“his writing is elegant, he tells a story well, and his polemical passages occasionally attain an unmatchable level of entertaining vitriol.” —David Trinidad, “The Poems Attributed to Him May Be by Different Poets” @alliumjournal.bsky.social @upittpress.bsky.social allium.colum.edu/fall-2022-po...

“your hand was still on my knee / and they were talking about gunrunning, Mayan treasures, and doing time, / and the Hilton in downtown San Salvador as if they were modern day spice / pirates instead of Alamo Heights kids” —Catherine Bowman, “Spice Night”

“Sir, I owe you nothing. / My dowries // are collapsed. I’m the ghost / your wedding photo snapped / into clean halves.” —Jill Alexander Essbaum, “Judas Hausfrau”

“It was humped in the greenery like a rabbit / in the rain. It seemed to be covered in a fine / gray fur. I saw its taste buds and nearly fainted. / Think of me what you will. I am no soldier / of the sensual world.” —Diane Seuss, “Tongue Sandwich” www.greenlindenpress.com/issue17-dian...

Thanks to @rhmacdonald.bsky.social for including me in another awesome issue! My poem is about me telling the Hartford Courant that my prep school was the creature of the landed gentry.

Sometimes you read a poem that’s like a tiny little scattered campfire of New American food, with a lean-to of caramelized carrots over a cube of striated meat and a perimeter glyph of a red wine reduction. And you wonder why you even bothered to show up for these 13.5 calories.

“I stagger in my sallow shirt through dusky Moscow, / brick lilies blossoming the length of its grey parkways. / I rest a pistol on my temple. Nothing happens.” — @michaeldumanis.bsky.social, “My Mayakovsky” @umasspress.bsky.social

“in the common darkness of the displaced, // I sit on the kitchen floor, whispering to him. My robe open // in the delicate light of an open refrigerator.” —Thomas A. Loudermilk, “Bed”

“A child who is stung by twelve wasps / will have a better understanding of time” —Matthew Rohrer, “The World Just Before the at Ease” www.nowculture.com/2008/rohrer.htm

“I hope you licked the ends of your colored / pencils. Also, that you carried a Trapper Keeper. The first time a girl / touched you, I hope you had graham crumbs on your mouth. I hope / she wore her brother’s hunting coat” —Kiki Petrosino, “Valentine” @sarabandebooks.bsky.social

“This strumpet muscle under your breast describing / you minutely, Volupt, volupt.” — @brendashaughnessy.bsky.social, “Swell” @fsgbooks.bsky.social

“While I made love in the mental hospital with a boy who had a fine-looking face / but might have been psychotic, my father taught his protégées to be risqué” —Adrian Blevins, “The Famous Men Who Made Me” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

“The wind rises or stops / and it means nothing. // I want to be circular; / a pond or a column of smoke/revolving, slowly, its ashes. // I want to turn back and go up / to myself at age 20, / and press five dollars into his hand” —Larry Levis, “Rhododendrons” voetica.com/poem/14705

“she’s stuck wearing the navy suit I chose the last time I styled her, a suit now thirteen years outdated, though fashionable enough when they closed the casket.” —Beth Ann Fennelly, “Two Sisters, One Thinner, One Better Dressed” www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

“the oddities: the tiny, jarred fetus turning, almost imperceptibly, like the rotation of an infant moon; the model of a syphilitic eye, sagging like the cut fig my father pushed around his plate” —Ryan Teitman, “The Cabinet of Things Swallowed” @boa-editions.bsky.social

“It’s time for lunch, it’s sushi takeout / Do not sink in a heap, John Keats / You are tubercular and five-foot-one” —Camille Guthrie, “My Boyfriend, John Keats” @atlengthmag.bsky.social atlengthmag.com/my-boyfriend...

“began to curse and shake their fists and spit / at Jeff Gordon, who didn’t even know they were there. You say // well, that’s NASCAR for you, but it’s as bad or worse when / the subject is Irish politics” —David Kirby, “She’s Not There” @onlypoemsmag.bsky.social onlypoems.com/poems/david-...

“The past is over and I’m over the past. My odometer // Is broken, can you help me? When you get this mess- / Age, I may be a half-ton crush, a half tone of mist // And mystery, maybe trooper bait with the ambulance / Ambling somewhere” —Terrance Hayes, “A. Machine”

“I was an altar boy smoking / behind the church. She was good. / It was good. All my lies are good. // I will not talk in tongues / 100 times in chalk. / Erase the board, young man.” —Jim Daniels, “I Slept with the Singing Nun” @upittpress.bsky.social

“You pointed at a photo of a plate / of macaroni cheese then a photo of a glass of wine. / ‘Great.’ // You coughed up a mothball. / It sat on the table between us like a sad, sucked imperial mint.” — @carolinebirduk.bsky.social, “Naphthalene Heights” @carcanet.bsky.social

“The APR on the Sapphire / Visa is bringing me down, // and the mania of the evening / commute is bringing me down. // I’m a bogged log in a rainforest / of traffic” — @jaswinderbolina.bsky.social, “The Old Country” @bigothermag.bsky.social @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social bigother.com/2020/07/01/f...