Stefanie Kirby

Yes!!! It's really tough out there. Sigh.

NPR listing for SHE'S UNDER HERE of 2025 "Books We Love." Keywords: biography & memoir, book club ideas, family matters, nonfiction, rather short, seriously great writing In 1974, Karen Palmer, then 17, fell in love with Gil, a 36-year-old in the midst of a divorce; she writes that he seemed like the answer to “How do I escape my unhappy home?” Yet over 14 years of marriage, Gil tormented Palmer with his alcohol and drug binges, illegal schemes, and violence, jealousy and control that only escalated when she filed for divorce. In a bid for safety, Palmer remarried and fled with her daughters to Colorado, where they all assumed new identities. Told with cinematic, heart-thumping detail, She’s Under Here offers haunting meditations on how fear lingers long after we reach safe shores and on what disappearing cost Palmer’s family. — Kristen Martin, book critic and author of The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood

Honored that SHE'S UNDER HERE is on @npr.org's list of 2025 "Books We Love."

😭

prose Sonnet The shirt in the poem was real, the house was not, and the last line was stolen from a philosopher who was in love with a 13-year-old boy. The attic window from which the reader views all of this alleged failing in love was pentagonal, red and yellow stained glass. Over the years, many neighborhood kids have tried to knock out the window with rocks and baseballs, but it can only be smashed from the inside out.

Mark Yakich from The Making Of Collateral Beauty

#smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Bread I was doing my best, then the day ganged up on me

happy #smallpoemsunday! 💜

feel free to participate by posting small poems you wrote, +/or small poems you love by somebody else :)

here’s one by Jesse Murray~

ode to the flute A man sings by opening his mouth a man sings by opening his lungs by turning himself into air a flute can be made of a man nothing is explained a flute lays on its side and prays a wind might enter it and make of it at least a small final song

Ross Gay

catalog of unabashed gratitude

#smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social

And every night
a possible key
to something beyond

Beyond grateful to have a half dozen new poems (from the forthcoming CLOUDWATCHER) appear in the brand new issue of @ampoetryreview.bsky.social! Here's one of them...

🚨 I have a new chapbook out in the world! 🚨

The Man is a sequence of 24 micro poems, all beginning with ‘The Man’. I also provided the doodles for the cover. I have 50 copies & they’re all pay-what-you-want (+ $4 for shipping) so DM me if you want a copy! 📚❤️

Two new poems published today in Midway Journal! #poetry #writing #poets #poems

We were captured by this dizzy flash piece by @willmusgrove.bsky.social

Take a spin here: asteralesjournal.com/1-4-musgrove...

WIDOW / WIDOWER'S WINTER Outside, the snow is falling into its past... I do want this night to end. In the fireplace, a section of ash caves in. The fall day you were buried, birds went over, south, thick enough to carry someone. They took my gapes of breath. -Their fuel? We are together in some birds, who fail. I didn't want to look down, to glimpse your grave, its heroic little mound like the peck of dirt we hope to eat in our life.

I do want this night to end.

Bill Knott

Christa fairbrother holding up the latest issue of Crannog Magazine. She's wearing a tan sleeveless collared sweater in front of an oak tree with a philodendron climbing it.

The poem A Bearcat is Not a Bear or a Cat but a Threatened Species

Thanks to Crannog Magazine for publishing this poem 😀

Just lovely!! Looking forward to this! 💙💙💙

The poetry collection, More Flowers, resting against a vase of red carnations. ♥️🌸💐

Proof copy is here, and she’s lovely, so let this be a little reminder that MORE FLOWERS is out with @triohousepress.org in less than 3 months! You can pre-order at the link in the replies or wherever books are sold!

Here’s to more poetry and more flowers!
🌺🌸🌼

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color on Tuesday

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VULNERABLE MAN At night, when we're not looking, small blue flowers close their mouths in the grass.

Chessy Normile 💙

WHAT CAN'T BE TAKEN Trauma was not being able to get the hands of the clock off me. Healing was learning no one has ever laid a fingerprint on the part of me that's infinite.

andrea gibson #smallpoemsunday

MORAL NARCISSISM fossil, cloud... it’s okay to like your little life. I have proof.

happy #smallpoemsunday! 💜

feel free to participate by posting small poems you wrote, +/or small poems you love by somebody else :)

here’s one by the brilliant @bartonsmock.bsky.social~

SCATTERED : in my mother's ashes : some sort of daughter : with an unreliable sense of direction

Eve Luckring 💙

from SIGNAL TO NOISE (Ornithopter Press)

@thetenderbetween.bsky.social
@ornithopterpress.bsky.social

three copies of white door on patterned upholstery fabric. cover image shows detail of Alternative Reality by Alan Sirulnikoff, photographer: logs floating on dark water and a white door among them.

front and backside of bookmark on same surface. Front shows detail of book cover, centering the door among logs. title isn't shown. Backside has a poem from the book printed on it plus attributions: Horizons Traditions I keep take hold in this soil slowly— home grows fainter still until distant slopes briefly make me forget where I am, re-etch longing.

yours truly (white woman, shoulder-length dark-blondish hair, glasses, dark green sweater, scarf with green and gray leafmotif) smiling into camera holding the book in front of her, white bookshelves along white walls in the background.

My debut collection WHITE DOOR is out!!! 💃✨💃
Thank you Carbonation Press & @gregbem.bsky.social!
Link to order and more info in 🧵
DM for signed copies/to review 🙏💙
Watch this space for events/news 😊

Sunset Do you forget the roar of tiny lungs unsettling your sleep? How I was once, a sparrow lost in the yard? Or was it safer for you to let him open new seams, your scars still so raw? I used to wake and run all of the faucets, as if we lived inside the falls. The house, lit like a constellation. Was I ever yours after that? There is such violence in the sunset. You wanted me to beg, but I held my breath as I wanted to be held. I should have said I wanted sky to claim the stars. That I understood to be a good girl I had to lie low like the aging hardwood floor. But, when I return, it's to stand in the soft light on the sun-porch. To admit the sunsets are drawn by my hand.

Chelsea Dingman ♥️

“There is such violence / in the sunset.”

@chelsdingman.bsky.social

Peggy Hinaekian, Birds On A Wire, c. 2000s

🥳🎂

⚡️HAD call for a cause ⚡️

REMEMBER the ruins the dry grass the sun at three o’clock fatigue & the house of the tragic poet

Emmanuel Hocquard, tr. Norma Cole

Claudia Rankine.

Izzy Casey — Bennington Review

This poem “In the History of the Glass Hospital Universe” might be my favorite of the year. From Izzy Casey in the recent issue Bennington Review.

November 12, 2025 Insomnia Diana Cao Refuse the day. In the night, a jewel balloon will hang doubled in the snow, an echo like anger curled in the mind, like a peeled thing without eyes, troubled, finite, and proud. Like the living. Now light rushes in from the window, flooding the day before you.

our series of tinies, from Tom Snarsky's #smallpoemsunday call are getting close to wrapping up... but not before this wonderful beauty from Diana Cao!

https://www.havehashad.com/9zyon

Still Life The backyard foxes are lean this winter, and the birds bright. Most days I can't bring myself to do anything but watch the vixen root for something. A run of good days means I'll spend hours rearranging the pantry, as if preparing to paint a Dutch still life. All that's missing is a milkmaid. Or a dead bird. My dress, wrinkled and sleeveless, is nothing like the sky. The foxes grow thinner, and I wonder whether I should feed them, though I don't really know what they eat. Nights stretch and I sleep little, but it's the days, the sun at four o'clock, that are the most difficult-when the movement of clouds appears full of peril. People once drilled holes into other people's skulls, just to let that darkness out.

M. Cynthia Cheung ♥️

from COMMON DISASTER (Acre Books)

I absolutely love this poem!

@acrebooks.bsky.social