Luthien

i am running into a new year by Lucille Clifton i am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that i catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what i said to myself about myself when i was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six even thirty-six but i am running into a new year and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me

happy new year to those around the world already celebrating—

returning, yes, to this Clifton classic—

My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me.

~ Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice

In friendship with the forests. Why do stones, soft mosses, ivy, dead wood, mushrooms, all that makes up the soil of the underbrush, seem so <good> to us? As if we were cradled in a hand, supported and welcomed. Both bed and table?

-Philippe Jaccottet
(tr. Tess Lewis)

The hand that I hold to the light
fills. What more do I offer you,
my love, than what the light gives?

-Cid Corman

CHALLENGE Don’t set up barriers it’s useless my unsheathed heart hurtles toward you.

Claribel Alegría, translated by D. J. Flakoll

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Vonnegut

In November, in the cold and in the evening, although I smell like figs and sea salt and the Island of Hydra, I read Rilke aloud and say, “I am dark; I am forest.” I read Rilke aloud and say, “Often when I imagine you, your wholeness cascades into many shapes.”

I am walking a lot, through the forest, and having tremendous conversations with myself.

Nietzsche (in the Black Forest)

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.

Paul Valéry

a poem before sleep

(translated by Kenneth Rexroth)

“My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.”

Marcel Proust

Each shadow, an abyss.

Kim Dorman
Kerala Journal

Count us among those who are lost to this world:
that’s the caravan we’re travelling with.

-Mir Taqi Mir
(tr. Ranjit Hoskote)

Our life is of woven wind.

-Joseph Joubert
(tr. Paul Auster)

Alice Wong taught us that disabled people don’t just leave memories behind—they leave infrastructure. Lineages of care. Methods of collectivity, survival. She named the connective tissue that holds our communities together, even across death, even across the losses that come too fast and too often.

"Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine."
(We all live in each other's shelter.)

From a message to my wife and me from Irish artist and dear friend, Liz Cullinane.

The soul is the weariest part of the body.

Paul Bowles

I don't wear any intentional fragrances, but I just passed a dude who smelled like a library, so I'm reconsidering.

Often when I imagine you,
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer, and I am dark;
I am forest.

Rilke

Dreamed an old poet said to me, “Poetry is simply looking at things with love.”

Anne Carson, Plainwater

I moonbathed diligently, as others sunbathe.

Denise Levertov

Moon woke me up nine times
—still just 4 a.m.

Basho

MP Pratheesh

(for @rloden.bsky.social)

Speaking of Richard Scarry, here’s my poem “Things That Go” published in Tilted House in 2021:

of herself, and I think about how careless people like to say that it doesn't cost anything to be kind, but that some of us know the truth, which is that the price of cracking yourself open to the world long enough to feel love for a stranger, which is the same as feeling love for yourself, is dear, so that it hurts more than a little to lean in as I pass by and spend it all on this girl, telling her how pretty those pictures are going to be. from Lonely Women Make Good Lovers BOA Editions, 2025

and I think about how careless people
like to say that it doesn't cost

anything to be kind, but that some of us know
the truth

—Keetje Kuipers
@boa-editions.bsky.social

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace, 1948

Once, you texted me a line of poetry. It wasn't one of the big ones, it was the kind of line I like. The record of a life: and I have sat and watched the trees.

Liza Hudock

@floodeditions.bsky.social

refuse to hustle, to be hurried, to be rushed, to decide, coerced, to be persuaded against your gut feelings—will be snail, morning slug on window, slow spider, dream sloth covered in moss, pregnant and uncomfortable pause, delay, the biggest and slowest breath in and out. it can all wait, darling.