Dr. J.D. Isip

This is excellent

thought “I haven’t written at all during vacation” so I started a poem and within a minute someone suggested we go and get Mexican food, this isn’t a complaint it’s a new life hack

“I will often read passages from some of my favorite writers to remind myself how some people really know how to give it up, by which I mean give up their secret dreaming selves, with honesty and artistry. Their example lifts me, emboldens me, when I am feeling depleted and paltry.” —Sam Lipsyte

Sontag Mag - A Journal of Craft & Poetry “We’re driving / through a desert that used to be a park, used to be lake, swamp, hiding place. / We’re on the run. It’s a movie.”

"... Under us asphalt melts, soup
of burning tar & human regret. We are
burning now. Driving. Burning. It’s too late."

"American Highway," new poem in Sontag Mag: sontagmag.com/sontag-mag-v...

at first, she delights
in the red apples,

then after we’ve lain
under the trees

she says, do you
see all the greens

9.VIII.25

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH PRAYING MANTIS Love Is a Wound that Will Happen The motel is from another era, its horseshoe driveway a half-loop of time. The wind beats the hills like carpets and orange pollen tumbles down. I wish you could show me again the black and white picture of your mother playing Juliet in Florence, the sleeves of her dress faring like trumpet flowers. It's summer. The stars come out; in what tense they shine, I've never been clear. Shutting my eyes, pulling the rough white sheet to my chin, I listen to the sparrows closing the trees, someone laughing, and in the leaves the rain picking up exactly where it left off eight years ago one August morning.

Chloe Honum 💙

from THE LANTERN ROOM (Tupelo Press)

“The stars come out; / in what tense they shine, I’ve never been clear.”

Day 8 - #SealeyChallenge

@tupelopress.bsky.social
@sealeychallenge.bsky.social

"I can cross paradise without my shadow / — a legal resident"

Mary Gilliland, 'Miracle Miles', in EMBER DAYS (@codhillpress.bsky.social)

@newsthatstays.bsky.social

#poetry #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity

“Form is never more than a *revelation* of content.” — Denise Levertov

Poem Not to Be Read at Your Wedding You ask me for a poem about love in place of a wedding present, trying to save me money. For three nights I've lain under glow-in-the-dark-stars I've stuck to the ceiling over my bed. I've listened to the songs of the galaxy. Well, Carmen, I would rather give you your third set of steak knives than tell you what I know. Let me find you some other, store-bought present. Don't make me warn you of stars, how they see us from that distance as miniature and breakable from the bride who tops the wedding cake to the Mary on Pinto dashboards holding her ripe, red heart in her hands.

Beth Ann Fennelly

Do you want to edit for JAKE? The poetry team is looking for some more hands!

john ashbery yr breath mints yr getting to the supermarket picking up a dozen flowers the war is over on tree line drive riding bikes and resisting arrest to say shoplifting and pink dresses cascading down synthetic ice plant if statistics are a chance at paradise

Cynthia Sailers

Bees Were Better BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE In college, people were always breaking up. We broke up in parking lots, beside fountains. Two people broke up across a table from me at the library. I could not sit at that table again though I did not know them. I studied bees, who were able to convey messages through dancing and could find their ways home to their hives even if someone put up a blockade of sheets and boards and wire. Bees had radar in their wings and brains that humans could barely understand. I wrote a paper proclaiming their brilliance and superiority and revised it at a small café featuring wooden hive-shaped honey-dippers in silver honeypots at every table.

“We broke up in parking lots, beside fountains.” A poem by Naomi Shihab Nye.

a purple background with the words " the cheek the nerve the audacity the gall and the gumption " written in yellow ALT: a purple background with the words " the cheek the nerve the audacity the gall and the gumption " written in yellow

"Say it to my FACE" is also my "go to" reaction

A Poem of Thanks I have been spared another day to come into this night as though there is a mercy in things mindful of me. Love, cast all thought aside. I cast aside all thought. Our bodies enter their brief precedence, surrounded by their sleep. Through you I rise, and you through me, into the joy we make, but may not keep.

Wendell Berry, born on this day in 1934

The cover of Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo: a silk-screened print of a shadowy, splayed hand with white fingernails and metal bracelets laid against another splayed hand

(4/61) “my prayer is a furnace. // A flame runs down the back of a generational horror. / It loosens itself from my womb.” —Yalie Saweda Kamara, “Three Days Before My Baptism” (Besaydoo) Milkweed Editions #61WomenPoets #WOC #61Books61Days #TheSealeyChallenge #SeptWomenPoets

Places I’ll Never See Again - The Forge Literary Magazine Places I’ll Never See Again, nonfiction by Andrew Bertaina

ICYMI new story up @theforge.bsky.social

forgelitmag.com/2025/08/04/p...

LITANY OF BROTHER'S HEIRLOOMS The fear of birds, but not their music. The small explosion of gunpowder inside a toy rocket, but not its parachute down. The ash limb Tío lathed into a bat. It's always resting by the front door. The pocket Gideon and enough spit to cradle a joint in its thin paper. But not the match that burned it sermon-quick. The butterfly knife you found nested in a rain gutter. The plastic telescope you stole from a mall kiosk just before my birthday. The night sky, but not the moon.

Steven Espada Dawson ♥️

from LATE TO THE SEARCH PARTY (Scribner)

Day 4 - #SealeyChallenge

@stevenespadaw.bsky.social
@sealeychallenge.bsky.social

Never Picked First For Playtime by Dustin Brookshire

LOVED how this smart, funny chapbook responds to Denise Duhamel’s Kinky—and Susan Collins, Salome, the Golden Girls, Red Lobster, and some countermovements that need calling out. Go @dustinbrookshire.bsky.social ! @sealeychallenge.bsky.social #sealeychallenge

Donald Hall Prize for Poetry Donald Hall Prize for Poetry: $5,500 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press 2025 Finalists RETROVIROLOGY by John Bonanni PRESENT TENSE by Michael Chang PEAR SNOW by Todd Dillard HEARTS ARE HEARTS EXCEPT MINE by Eli Dunham CECIL by David A. Gaines PROXEMICS by Ashley Seitz Kramer ARCHITECTURE OF GRIEF by Sarah Nance SENSE/FLUTTER/RATTLE by Ty P Newcomb GIGANTIC by Kent Shaw COURAGE AND THE CLOCK by Emma Trelles

so I have some news

“August, you’re just an erotic hallucination, just so much feverishly produced kazoo music, are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night, this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion, the bogus moon of tenderness and magic you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?” —Denis Johnson

“Living was like trying to guess where lightning would appear next in the sky.”

An in between time and a little bit of Italy. Brand new @andrewbertaina.bsky.social in @theforge.bsky.social!

I'm inspired by #thesealeychallenge to read more this August. Even if I don't hit double digits, I appreciate the opportunity to focus more on poetry (even though I'm sure my sci-fi/romance novels will miss me).

a woman in a judge 's gown says you did it to yourself ALT: a woman in a judge 's gown says you did it to yourself

Look, I don't like calling people out in public, but those folks who saw, "New version of War of the Worlds starring the acting legends Ice Cube and Eva Longoria, mostly filmed on Zoom..." and decided, "Yeah, let's watch that" - I have no sympathy for you.

I'm excited about this! The last round I did was a few years back and it was amazing. As has been said before, Kathy Fish is a witch. There is no other other explanation as to how she magics the stories out of us 😍

A poem from Erin Moure's collection. PILLAGE 5 ("Fairview") incl lines "What do skirts foil? A love sequence left you. You were a shore.:

Cover of PILLAGE LAUD by Erin Moure BookHug Reissues (2011)

For #SealeyChallenge /1 book a day #Day1 Re-issue of Canadian poet Erin Moure's Pillage Laud
@bookhugpress.bsky.social (experimental computer generated prompts circa 1998 meet queer eros poetics.) Wrestling intimate meaning from structural systems. #gaza fundraise @openpoetrybooks.bsky.social

‘Bob Marley, Live, 1980’
-Kwame Dawes

The New Yorker, Aug 4, 2025

Johannes Göransson

@johannesg.bsky.social
@tarpaulinsky.bsky.social

NEW POEM #255: "Tracings" by Annette Sisson

"Sharp as a pen,
as an ink-tipped

tongue, a horntail
snail leaks

iridescence in soil"

stonecirclereview.com/tracings/

#Poem #PoetryCommunity #Poetry #NewPoem

@sealeychallenge.bsky.social day 2: STIFF WRIST by @benkline.bsky.social.

“… I kissed strangers / to taste their other lovers. I know / how I sound, over fifty and wagging. / But love is a verb. Do it / to enjoy it.”

#sealeychallenge #poetrysky #poetrynews #books

A person sitting at a desk with a laptop and coffee, looking focused and engaged in their work, with a cozy and organized workspace in the background.

this one from Elena Zhang is for anyone with an email inbox

https://www.havehashad.com/e8ojl