Libre

Poetry today by E. A. Midnight

“how much of love is seeing
someone else’s mental illness as a quirk / and not failure, not a dent, not
something that must be fixed”

librelit.com/2025/09/20/m...

We’re all walking around in dreams on a daily basis. Read our poets below. We’re proud of them.

It fails us a good deal, too, and as I’m up past midnight working on these, I wonder whether that’s for our own benefit in the long run. Having access to the complete story of ourselves would come at some great, dear cost to the crucial cushioning of delusion we take for granted as our everyday.

10 more pieces by poets we’ve had the honor of previously hosting. Memory’s weird and flexible and holds time in its tissues, in case anyone’s out there looking for the source of the stuff.

FEATURING:

🧠https://librelit.com/read/year-one/archive/

Courtney LeBlanc
Stacey C. Johnson
Lydia Rae Bush
Chrissy Stegman
David Cazden
Merlin Flower
Sam Floyd
Claude Clayton Smith
Joshua Kulseth
Liz DiGregorio

Poetry today by Eric Lawson

“Too hot for clothes, too alone to care.”

librelit.com/2025/08/20/e...

“I will say my goodbyes to each room. Remember our newborn snuggling on a sheepskin rug, hear the creaking herringbone parquet floors, relive my postpartum vigil at the bedroom window, the slow-motion clouds.”

Delighted to see my piece In Between in @librelit.bsky.social

Months lapsed make mild critique more interesting to look at. I offer you 10 more previously published pieces from our archives today, and I hope they’ll bring—at best—the satisfaction of Full Circle.

Glimpsing a name I’ve had correspondence with months ago jogs certain feelings: the integral slant of morning sunlight on the first Friday of Libre’s publication schedule, or how the contributor punctuated, responded in gladness or anxiety.

There’s a space in memory I like referring to as ‘the pigmented remains’. It’s the stuff we half-remember or the impressions that are press-able, full to their diaphanous widths with spongy recall. Revisiting and re-formatting these archival YEAR ONE pieces has been a bloodbath of color.

FEATURING:

MICHELLE MCMILLAN-HOLIFIELD
NA ASHELEY ASHITEY
LAUREN MCGOVERN
JENNIFER JONES
EMMA ROTH
EDWARD MICHAEL SUPRANOWICZ
JIANNA HEUER
IVAN DE MONBRISON
KUSHAL PODDAR
TAYLA NADEN

librelit.com/read/year-on...

“The velocity of water molecules determines their form—from mist to sea to glacier. In Scandinavia, people plunge into ice baths after saunas to improve their circulation. In the past, insane asylums used cold water torture as a ‘treatment’ to subdue psychiatric patients.”

Fictions today by @yallaalia.bsky.social

librelit.com/2025/08/16/a...

Fiction today by @ilanamiral.bsky.social

“And the shorter your hair, the closer they are to your skull.”

librelit.com/2025/08/13/i...

Good morning! We’re pleased present a video reading by Ace Boggess for his Issue Three: Cinema piece “How Much Do You Plan to Splurge in the Coming Year?”

Link to website: librelit.com/issue-three/...

Link to YouTube: youtu.be/VsgWwlCJ9w8?...

Poetry today by Adrienne Marie Barrios:

“I learned that you built a wall, but the wall has windows, maybe even a door with hinges I can pry off with my teeth…”

librelit.com/2025/08/09/a...

Poetry by Andrew Cox today on the site:

“Before the bobcats adopted my mother and made her queen.”

librelit.com/2025/08/06/a...

Incredibly grateful and thrilled to have an interview out with Libre. Thank you so much to the lovely Mary B. Sellers for featuring me!

You should definitely check out the rest of Libre Lit’s publications. They are doing captivating and important work for the mental health and literary community.

We have an interview out with Victoria Garcia today.

librelit.com/2025/07/29/i...

“people i’ve outgrown” by Salem Paige

“surely you recognize the
migratory patterns of your
whims”

librelit.com/2025/08/02/s...

Featuring:

CHARLOTTE COLE
ROBERT NERSESIAN
PATTY SOMLO
HAROLD LIMINAL
E.H. JACOBS
MARK ANTONY ROSSI
MARK SHAPIRO
TERRY SANVILLE
R.M. DAVENPORT
LAUREN MCGOVERN

I’m looking Change in the eye as I write this and welcoming it over, but before it fully takes effect, we have a job to do. The archives is still underway, and after weekend work, I offer you 10 more pieces by previous contributors, now available on the site.

🧠: librelit.com/read/year-on...

Site updates for anyone who’s bored enough to want them. Updated daily in hopes of getting the word out there.

librelit.com/log

🧠 librelit.com/read/year-on...

SANDRA MARILYN
KELLIE BROWN
BRANNON O’BRENNAN
ISIOMA NGOZI
BRETT STUCKEL
GEOFFREY AITKEN
JANET HELLER
WILLIAM MILLER

We’ll keep them always in the newly safe net of the Archives. Even if Libre doesn’t last forever, I’ll continue paying the fees towards keeping the website open. Enjoy these early pieces of prose and poetry below:

Grateful to the early voices of Libre, when the intent was baby-pure, so simplified it was a nice shade of blue and see-through: a gathering of voices on the internet speaking clearly about the private, making public the caliber of pain they couldn’t publish anywhere else.

Reppert writes around forgiveness in restrained language that elevates the art of poetic sparsity.

librelit.com/2025/07/23/f...

A few weeks off, but we’re back to archiving. Due to personal circumstances, I had to step away for a brief time to fail and manage and fail and restore my offline life.

We’re so grateful to these contributors. Revisit their meter if you’ve got the time.

or the emotional translucence that follows a thumbs-up (business-blue, the embodiment of culture’s thanking-device). We congratulate one another in numbers these days, and while the programming’s invisible, the sentiment of seeing and taking part is as Homo sapien as fingernails.

When we speak around healing, we’re speaking to the greater collective experience of trauma-swapping. Social media’s the NYC basement communal bath, set to epsom salts, the variety of which is digitized, comes in the logarithmic packaging of opaque heart icon,