Nicholas Yingling

Abeyance Today my friend told me of her girl's hand-dug coffin; how in Antarctica, training to stay alive meant to pickaxe, crack, and cut, until a furrow the size of a brown bear appears and her graduate school daughter descends into a trench barely length-wise enough for her sleeping sac; eventually sealed-off with a brick of snow. An ice coffin, the mother told me, gently recalling how her offspring slipped beneath the crust of the world. How the hours spent warming hands in armpits was worth it. To survive the woman relied on her own muscle work— a lacey box of molecules and the animal beat of her heart. At dusk with the exercise completed, the men disappeared to hot showers, a dinner of ribs in the ranger station, but her daughter remained underground. She had labored for hours and was determined to sleep beneath the ice. And then suddenly, the next morning as she climbed up-solidly alive, stunned by the machinery of her own body. I like to believe she knew herself as different— changed as Persephone had changed, into a new woman— lifted into a blue abeyance-beyond the self and climbing.

This incredible poem from Susan Rich in BLUE ATLAS 💙

Day 6 - #SealeyChallenge

@susanrich-poet18.bsky.social
@redhenpress.bsky.social
@sealeychallenge.bsky.social

Poets, get your manuscripts ready! Perugia Press’s annual prize opens August 1. Open to women poets, inclusive of all gender-expansive definitions of that term, who have not published more than one full-length collection. Full guidelines & submission info in linktree. Can’t wait to read your work!

🚨SALE!🚨I noticed a certain retailer is selling my book for less than $5 and thought I should offer copies for the same price! So, if you've been wanting to read DRESSING THE BEAR, l'd love to send you it! $5 INCLUDES SHIPPING, until I run out! DM me! And thank you in advance! 💙 @triohousepress.org

Please check out our blog (linktree in bio) to read more about the work of Saba Keramati and her book Self-Mythology (U. of Arkansas Press, 2024).🌟 @sabadilla15.bsky.social @uarkpress.bsky.social

The Book Eaters - Perugia Press Conceived in loss, The Book Eaters examines shifts in identity due to Partition, immigration, illness, and birth. It is also a study in belonging—to our bodies, memories, stories, ourselves, families…

Carolina Hotchandani’s debut collection, “conceived in loss, examines shifts in identity due to Partition, immigration, illness, and birth.”

THE BOOK EATERS is published in @perugiapress.bsky.social & featured in our #APAHeritageMonth reading list: perugiapress.org/product/the-...

This poem will be available in an accessible online format at Poetry Magazine's website shortly. You'll also be able to listen to me read it.

Cover of Poetry Magazine's June 2025 issue: half-carton of eggs, with the letters P O E T R Y painted on them.

Feeling grateful (also floored) to turn to a page in Poetry Magazine & find this poem I wrote, with all admiration, after Mary Oliver's "When Death Comes."

Thank you, Adrian, Lindsay, Holly, et al.

My pleasure. Fantastic reading.

Cover of WHEN I SAY THE BONES I MEAN THE BONES by Amanda Hawkins

Bears Ears National Monument and Other Diminishing Lands What gods do we grope in common-what land sprawls to the west- what oceans will swallow our solid continents? I wanted the remnants, the salvageable bones kept clean and away from light. The paintings-one might stand too close the breath to carry the unseen, water droplets decay what would be preserved. Kept, I thought, was the operative word suspended-the holy space set aside. Who says such preservation is in contention with logic- land lies bare, flat, folded, stacked, and ripped along a seam. The bones of the dead are everywhere believed to be sacred. The land exposed, but most hidden by oceans rising, by the land being by nature a surface. When I say land sometimes I mean belief. When I say ocean

I mean all the rest unarticulated with the mouth's profane shape. I mean to say how the body moves is praxis, the paintings on the stone were roped off to keep pilgrims from touching-to preserve what could be lost. But when I say the bones I mean the bones.

"When I say land
sometimes I mean belief. When I say ocean

I mean all the rest

unarticulated with the mouth's
profane shape"
-Amanda Hawkins from WHEN I SAY THE BONES I MEAN THE BONES @wapress.bsky.social

Cover of IN THE HOUSE OF MODERN UPBRINGING FOR GIRLS by Majda Gama

Tala (To the Girl Palm) When I ate the fruit of the date palm delivered fresh to me from an oasis in the empty quarter, admired the gilt-twined bag the fruit lay in, & hesitated to disturb this wonder of Arab irrigation, fruit bat pollination, & desert patience, I knew why fathers send their daughters to the West with kilos of dates: sukkary, khudry, segai, heavily wrapped & suspicious in luggage; the care in the fruit meant to last us in places where trees drop all their leaves & appear dead to the eye. I eyed my gift, portioned myself one to eat on a balcony casting a cool shadow over sand speckled with blood & feathers from a wild falcon kill, knew I could have sent that falcon into the sky to feed, knew that to the East, in the oasis, young girl-palms were sheltering, growing, while men in white bathed & dressed them, named them, then let the desert raise them.

Greek Gods, 1978 I was often told to smile by complete strangers as if a six-year-old girl in patched bellbottoms & a Mork & Mindy t-shirt wasn't cheerful enough I had to dwell in their space just while passing them on the sidewalk walking but in my mind gliding in new sneakers that promised hermetic levels of flight I knew Greek mythology could even pronounce the Gods correctly they had names like my heroes on Battlestar Galactica which I watched with my twin & parents in footed pajamas after my father brushed my hair to a stellar shine I'd open my eyes wide to receive the feathered hair & sensational teeth of Starbuck my 1st crush but he didn't like brunettes like me or dark jump-suited Athena who served on the ship's bridge sending space warriors into battle with a girl-next-door attitude & contoured cheeks she lost him over & over again to Cassiopeia of the white-winged disco dresses who was hopelessly blonde like my mother who everyone eyed sideways when she walked by them same for Cassiopeia no one seemed to breathe around her & Starbuck never really had to choose but they fought over him nonetheless while he just threw on his leather jacket & blasted himself into space with a joystick off to fight Cylons in a fleet of jets called Vipers I hated her (I loved my mother) I still don't trust blonde women I had the power to dress myself & dressed for myself with Wonder Woman Underoos underneath as armor for when neighborhood boys thundered by in a gang of big-wheels catcalling & that was all I knew of romance for an age.

"I was often told to smile by complete strangers
as if a six-year-old girl in patched bellbottoms
& a Mork & Mindy t-shirt wasn't cheerful enough"
- @majda.bsky.social from IN THE HOUSE OF MODERN UPBRINGING FOR GIRLS @wapress.bsky.social

A powerful and intimate exploration into the violence of loss within the female experience set against motifs of climate change, disease and generational trauma.

I, DIVIDED by @chelsdingman.bsky.social (@lsupress.bsky.social)

#NationalPoetryMonth Day 19 ❤️

#poetry #poetrycommunity #ecohumanscape

Thank you, Stefanie!!

This poem by @nyingling.bsky.social in the new Sixth Finch: 🔥🔥🔥
I'll be thinking about that ending for a long time.

Sixth Finch Sixth Finch: a quarterly online journal of poetry and art. The current issue features poems by Megan Alpert, Michael Bazzett, Matt Daly, Chris Haven, Rebecca Hawkes, David Dodd Lee, Timothy Liu, Malia...

Our spring issue is live: sixthfinch.com
Featuring @meganalpert.bsky.social @mikhailbazharov.bsky.social @timothyliupoet.bsky.social @thatjanemorton.bsky.social @katnuernberger.bsky.social @lisaallenortiz.bsky.social @dustinkpearson.bsky.social @dia-roth.bsky.social @pagestar.bsky.social and more

BODY AS SONG, BODY AS BLOOD COUNT Stress, a virus, a two-mile walk home through wildfire smoke when the busses shut down, someone else’s mortgage smoldering in my marrow, too much lead from the mothball fleet or chromium in the groundwater, until the next administration raises the acceptable limit, a childhood beneath the towers and test sirens of a refinery, a city of employees called to service, a rain like resin eating through car paint, the tomatoes— heirlooms sliced red to the seed—we were advised not to grow, living along the border of a class-action lawsuit: to understand the numbers inside me, the hematologist plots my blood on a graph. She draws a bell curve. At both ends the distribution levels out into pure sound, not the instrument but its toll.

Grateful to @sixthfinch.bsky.social for publishing two of my poems. Check out the whole issue here:

sixthfinch.com/mainspring25...

Gratitude to Nicholas Yingling for this gift of reading, seeing & sharing Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021). Appreciate this so much! 🌹📖💞 @nyingling.bsky.social @cavankerrypress.bsky.social

It was so nice seeing you again, Becky. And such a powerful, loving book you've written.

Cover of UNCERTAIN ACROBATS by Rebecca Hart Olander. Three dancers or one dancer in three positions, oriented so their bodies are horizontal.

The Cancer Is Back We blend bone meal with soil at the base of rosebushes, tendering roots with the dust of other lives. It is this life I want, we seem to say, with each swath of dead perennials we clear, making way for what we assume will come. But there is nothing to mix into this unspeakable void. The cells are doing their dire multiplying, and we already fed them all our best poison. Can you stand to enter those changing rooms again? The metallic pull across of the striped curtain, the flimsy wraparound of a backwards robe? Couldn't you go on seeking cyber chess domination, tying up pork loins stuffed with apricots and sage, wearing the vest you bought in Santa Fe until the buttons all fall off? No more pinpoint tattoos! Your single lung has only just learned to live alone.

Find Alternate Routes is what the digital road sign flashed at me as I drove downtown, as if there is another path through this thicket, as if we are sleeping beauties and can be kissed out of our darkness, as if we can cut away kudzu and it will stop letting down its insidious hair, as if we can uproot bittersweet and it will cease its blood red choking of the lilacs, as if you will be unchanged, robust like you were when I was seven and we crouched together in mirrored pose mimicking the stance of breaking into a run, me in my burnt orange corduroy jumpsuit, hair parted to the side and clasped with a barrette, my blue Keds beside your running sneakers still laced tight from the hometown 5K you raced in your sweaty, sun-worn baseball cap, your skin browned from being in the world, early fall 1979, and every beautiful muscle showed in your legs and your flashing smile, oh, damn this route you are racing now, all those other games gone, your detour paved with brittle prognosis, coasting swells nothing like the adrenaline that used to course through, making you feel every inch a man.

"We blend bone meal with soil at the base of rosebushes,
tendering roots with the dust of other lives"
- @rholanderpoet.bsky.social from UNCERTAIN ACROBATS

The Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Literary Prize 2025 Submission open on May 5 2025

The Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Literary Prize returns – and this time, it's for fiction.

Run by @ballerinibookpress.bsky.social with the support of Kari's family and her partner Bill Abney, the award this year will be judged by @rfredekenter.bsky.social.

Find out more here ...
bit.ly/3Raw18J

Cover of BLUE ATLAS by Susan Rich. Four potted plants ascending stairs. The pots are a deep blue against the turquoise stairs.

This Could Happen If you kept walking, you would eventually step outside of yourself. You would leave the bones of your body, the bloodlines to all that you loved. You would be free of breasts, liberated from the eyes of body admirers- to travel this earth like a star lily or skunk flower with the forbearance of golden bees. If you kept walking out of the self you could begin again as seawater, as spindrift. Don't worry, you'd say, you're a virgin non-body, you're a witness to ten thousand new worlds. No lungs, no heart, no breath- irresistible now, what might you see? A bird's dying shudder or lovers knotted in a plotline of release? You're an example now of nothing, a fountain of nowhere-

"No lungs, no heart, no breath-
irresistible now, what might you see?

A bird's dying shudder or

lovers knotted in a plotline of release?
You're an example now

of nothing, a fountain of nowhere-"

-Susan Rich from BLUE ATLAS @redhenpress.bsky.social

In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls Check out In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls - <p>Winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award, <em>In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls</em> is Majda Gama's first full-length poetry coll...

My book is out wherever you like to buy books! In the Uk it’s online with @waterstones.bsky.social as well as @foylesforbooks.bsky.social in the USA I like bookshop.org/p/books/in-t...

So good to see you too! (I absolutely inhaled this book, couldn't put it down.)

Cover of Joe Wilkins' PASTORAL, 1994. A barbed wire fence at dusk or dawn, everything but the horizon still dark.

FABLE Coyotes sleep nose to tail in dank caves. A lonesome mountain lion lids the slats of her eyes. In the wind yucca flowers dune and drift. I know the names of things here, the very rise where my father's bones lie, not so far from my grandfather's, and save a sad handful of stories that's as far as we go. Like a city street that ends in a high fence, and it is unclear what has been fenced in, or out, and even here, in this nameless city, you'll find coyotes snouting and slavering after grease and trash, the odd housecat, and it's their recolonizing racket that wakes the child, who rises, whose small hands tremble against cold window glass, and the child's father, a man whose daily work is to take work away from other men, leads the child back to bed, tucks him in, blesses him, blesses him.

PASTORAL, 1992 My little brother & I are walking the irrigation dike. The night moonless, overcast, no farmlights for miles-this is true darkness, the kind you might call ink or river bottom, storm or stone, under the covers, up a cow's ass, closed casket. My brother breathes wetly behind me. Mud sucks at our sneakers. It is straight up & down July 4 midnight. My fingers stink of gunpowder & potato salad. When I close my eyes firecrackers leap & pop, & all I want is more- more spark & trace, whistle & bang- but what I've got is a field flooded all to hell & back, surely now a useless crop of foxtail, & my little brother half-asleep on his feet & when I stop running smack into me. Now we are splayed out like dummies in the mud, like shot soldiers, like angels telling lies about the stars.

"Now we are splayed out like dummies
in the mud, like shot soldiers, like angels telling lies about the stars."
-Joe Wilkins from PASTORAL, 1994 @riverriverbooks.bsky.social

Today is the last day to get your work in!

Subs close tonight at midnight (PT).

shopoetryjournal.submittable.com/submit/31379...

Really stoked to have a new poem in the spring issue of @theshorepoetry.bsky.social! I have long admired this journal, & I’m grateful to the editors for including me—& alongside so many poets I love! Happy World Poetry Day, too, friends! 💙

Read the issue here: www.theshorepoetry.org/issue-25

Dorianne Laux 💙

from WHAT WE CARRY

The cover of THE OPPOSITE OF CRUELTY by Steven Leyva.

Seasonal Depression Give the termites your worry / about affording the rent. They too / are saying, eat / the rich. Two kids up / the block slash a neighbor's tires / while the elderly / couple are away at a wedding. Why / do I even bother to tell / anyone who's listening / that everyone involved was white / except me? Give the newborn / mosquitos their banquet of blood and your worry / about diabetes and rotted teeth. Who can say / what insectivore / is waiting/ to eat the things that eat / your worry. Joy: the long-tongued sloth / or joy: the pitcher / plant. Given the insistence on phoenix your tendons return to / given the moles that arrive / on your neck / year after / year from your grandmother / given the fact / that every elegy fails / to reach its true audience / why do I bother / to slash and slash and slash / white from this page?

"Give the termites your worry / about affording the rent. They too / are saying, eat / the rich."
- @stevenleyva.bsky.social from THE OPPOSITE OF CRUELTY

have you signed up yet?

Cover of HORTENSIA, IN WINTER by Megan Merchant.

SUBJECTS TO CONSIDER FOR BOTH PAINTING & WRITING Film on my teeth after eating a hard-boiled egg. Why anyone would call blood crimson. Chopping wood on a day you can see your breath. The clicking sound that Mahjong tiles make. The speed at which they are placed. A windchime strung with bones. The way winter light feels most earnest in the morning. His chin, as it pressed against my shoulder blade. The muscles of grief that cramp without warning. Why men are allowed to age-the absence of a societal tantrum. The Farmer's Almanac that everyone in town is mumbling about. Radishes in a white bowl. Glue, hardened, on the window that looks like frost. Scratches on old records that are a kind of music. Gray hairs in the sink. How he unhooked the curtains and wrapped me, naked, in what light they still held.

PORTRAITURE: NUDE We are taught to yearn for erasure. Red stockings drying over the porcelain tub. Strands of hair in the sink. The spot of shade between thighs. Pigeons on the landing, iridescent until the light rearranges, shifts to the apartment next-door, unpacks. If you were to paint want back into my skin, it would be with an old brush, streaks of morning blue stained into the bristles. The wood handle smooth, the air in the room tasting most like Spanish olives spooned directly from the can.

"How he unhooked the curtains and wrapped me, naked, in what light they still held"

- @meganmerchant.bsky.social from HORTENSIA, IN WINTER

News & Announcements - Tahoma Literary Review

@tahomareview.bsky.social opens for subs on Jan 15th & we now publish poems in translation!💖

My fellow editors interviewed me about this addition here: tahomaliteraryreview.com/news-announc...

Please share!

& get your subs ready! We pay and we offer fee-free subs for those in need.

Cover of SMOKING THE BIBLE by Chris Abani.

WHITE EGRET "The whole earth is filled with the love of God." -KWAME DAWES A stream in a forest and a boy fishing, heart aflame, head hush, tasting the world- lick and pant. The Holy Scripture is animal not book. I should know, I have smoked the soul of God, psalm burning between fingers on an African afternoon. And how is it that death can open up an alleluia from the core of a man? How easily the profound fritters away in words. And the simple wisdom of my brother: What you taste with abandon even God cannot take from you. All my life, men with blackened insides have fought to keep the flutter of a white egret in my chest from bursting into flight, into glory.

EJIMA after David St. John That way the Yoruba carve the likeness of a child when its twin dies. Carve a doll for the soul still journeying across a vale of light and shade. Dress it in a tunic of leather, cloth, beads, and cowries. A new birth, a new child, carried by the mother and fed with love and breast milk. Suckled next to the living-flesh to wood, blood to grain, spirit to body. When the soul knows better how to come and go, when the spirit is warmed from anger, slowly, over time, it sits by itself on the shrine, gathers cobwebs and dust and a gentle neglect. Until then, my brother, I carry your doll, a photograph of the child you were, close to my heart. And when you call in the dark I answer, calm your soul, sing it into light. In time, you will join the album on my ancestral shrine and gather cobwebs and the dust from the dust, grow sticky and fat from palm oil and gin, wear your gentle neglect with a hush.

"What you taste with abandon
even God cannot take from you"

-Chris Abani from SMOKING THE BIBLE @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social