Susan L. Leary

🌸🌺🌼

Thank you, Sam! 🌸

Robert Bly:

“Whoever has no house now will establish none,”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

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This poem appeared in The Essential Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke, published by Ecco, 1999. Shared here with deep gratitude.

Square abstract collage assembled from scraps of brightly colored paper In hues of orange teal pink and red. Blue and tans provide the background and a bright green and black square appears at upper left. The phrase "why does your mother say this?" Is featured.

#ArtAdventCalendar day 9

"why does your mother say this?"

little 4" x 4" #collage on canvas from my Daily-Life Language series, (featuring fragments cut from a 1937 children's English language textbook)

Terminal Surreal by Martha Silano, a book of poems featuring a neon pink death moth and purple orchid on its cover, held up in my living room

Poem by Martha Silano, full text below ABECEDARIAN WITH ALS A little bit sane (a little bit not). Blackbirds that turned out to be boat-tailed grackles. Crows that cannot covert their fury of feathers. Don't say Relyvrio reminds you of hemlock. Every wave reassuringly governed by the moon, but what about riptides? F*ck a duck! Glad there's a joyful edge, though narrower than a willet's beak. Hail in the forecast. A bitter taste: it enables animals to avoid exposure to toxins. Jaw stiffens, then relaxes. What will my body do next? Kindness, we decide, is what we want to broadcast, letting someone pull out in front of you in traffic, make their turn, because the universe isn't elegant, no one's really going anywhere important, or running late to spin or vinyasa or pilates. The neutral neutrons of the nucleus. Quarks that are up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom, though rehab in the CD, a lunch date in Leschi, PT in Madrona-it happens. Socrates died of centripetal paralysis, a prominent loss of sensation. Terminal: I wish it was more like waiting out a storm with an $18 glass of pinot. Unbound bound. Very much looking forward to overcooked orzo and finely chopped squash. What was that you assured me-when we die, we wake from a dream? X marks the rear of the theater—one shove of poison —into a pure realm. You know we're all getting off at the same exit, right? Zooey's wish: to pray without ceasing.

What was that you assured me—when we die, we wake from a dream?

Martha Silano
@acrebooks.bsky.social

If you're Nobody too, then make plans to join us for Dickinson's 195th birthday celebration!

Newer every day:
A Dickinson Birthday Celebration
Weds., Dec. 10, 6pm ET
VIRTUAL PROGRAM
Register: emilydickinsonmuseum.org/newer-every-day-195th-birthday

St. Cocaine of Lines, St. Anisette, St. Marijuana, St. Horse My mother owned a cauldron so rusted, nothing could live in it. Sometimes, I swore, I could feel the sharp tips of the orange crescent moon. Back then, my favorite Beatle was George, best color, black, best day Wednesday. I liked to be strange and I was. But that's a lie. I'd just want and want. And Grandma said: wanting wanting wanting wanting wanting. Once, in the farms, I picked up a long willow stick and immediately it transformed into a garter snake. Nixon was the President. Even now, I question the symmetry of his name, the heart of cross. In the golden church I sat tonight, I watched a sweet young girl itch— delicious nod, her long arms like the ivory saint with the plate of eyes, her crown of lit candles. I want to read illuminated mysteries: I want to read about the woman saints, the drunk ones, the wrecked and wasted. Once, in the farms near my ranch house, I dug down to rutted earth for clay. I could mold small figures with the soft gray mud, bake them hard in the sun. A poem by Jennifer Martelli, published in Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree (2024)

I liked to be strange and I was. But that's a lie. I'd just want and want.
And Grandma said: wanting wanting wanting wanting wanting.

Jennifer Martelli

💐The countdown is on! 💐MORE FLOWERS releases with @triohousepress.org in less than 60 days, so thank you in advance for your patience with all my little reminders, and please consider pre-ordering at the link. I am super excited to share these poems!

triohousepress.myshopify.com/products/mor...

💐The countdown is on! 💐MORE FLOWERS releases with @triohousepress.org in less than 60 days, so thank you in advance for your patience with all my little reminders, and please consider pre-ordering at the link. I am super excited to share these poems!

triohousepress.myshopify.com/products/mor...

🐶🩵💙

Tomorrow night!!!

💙

PAST What is the past? We needed a word for everything before. See how my saying this is already there, and there for good —no fishing it out of that deep water, the deepest there is. The past is a tide that drags out but won't return to shore: even your question has been carried off. Look, you can see it floating. Anything heavier settles unseen like wreckage for a silver ribbon of fish to slip through. The past is not all distant. We can stand at its edge, watching the waves do the backbreaking work of pulling, pulling away. From the shore, the past seems to go on forever, because it does. We say it was a different time, but all times are different. This one, for instance. And again, this one.

Maggie Smith ♥️

@maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social
@tupelopress.bsky.social

“… The construction of anything is complaint,
Is highway robbery, is unadulterated system.”

this by @susanlleary.bsky.social in The Louisville Review

Pat: Thank you! 💙🙏

'As if the beautiful world has no end.'

Loved this Dan Rosenberg poem from the latest @sixthfinch.bsky.social

she would never come into my arms
without believing that I wanted something.

from Marie Howe's "The Girl"

168 Resistance is only hope. Like the moon of Hypnos full tonight in all its quarters, tomorrow vision upon the passage of poems.

René Char, tr. Cid Corman

Photo of “Every Living Day” by Adam Gianforcaro

@adamg.bsky.social absolutely loving this 🔥

Mary Ruefle

Snowfall
~ Mark Strand

Watching snow cover the ground, cover itself, cover everything that is not you, you see it is the downward drift of light upon the sound of air sweeping away the air, it is the fall of moments into moments, the burial of sleep, the down of winter, the negative of night.

POEM 290: The One in a Million Cat by Millie Tullis (@millietullis.bsky.social)

Could I bring home the ox,
if I were the Ox-Cart Man? How
would I keep the millions of cats
from fighting, if I were
the Millions of Cats Man?
How I would keep them fed
if I were his Wife.

stonecirclereview.com/the-one

Delighted to have a poem in the wonderful new Christmas Anthology from @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social! 🎄

My copy arrived just as I discovered 'Hellebore' has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize! ❄️

A photo of a tree paired with lines from Joy Harjo's poem "Remember."

"Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems."
- Joy Harjo, Remember
#imageandverse #poetry #photography #trees

💙

Banner graphic shows a close-up of Tanya Rastogi's oil painting "In Gilded Walls," featuring a young woman of South Asian descent in rich warm hues. Black text on a pale orange-tinted background lists the author photos, names, and poem titles of Shō Poetry Journal's nominees for the 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Award.

Announcing Shō Poetry Journal’s nominees for the inaugural Monarch Queer Literary Awards (@monarch.gay)!
• William Ward Butler @williamwardbutler.bsky.social
• Ranudi Gunawardena
• Mickie Kennedy @mickimaynard.bsky.social
• Jackson D. Moorman
• Ciaran Pierce

An image of Joy Harjo's poem, "Catching the Light."

I first read this poem in my father's final days. It took my breath away. Tomorrow will mark one week since we lost him, but I know he's still with us. So grateful to have (finally!) read _The People's Project_, edited by @theferocity.bsky.social and @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social, where it appears.

The cover art is based on a photograph by William Robichaud / Ban Vangban Village / Wildlife Conservation Society. The photo is blown up and stylized in teal and brownish black that make it look like a painting. It covers the entirety of the cover with the title and author showing as two separate horizontal banners. The photo depicts a jungle scene with a Saola seemingly standing sideways in water, looking towards the camera.

Beast you are who calls to the beast I am I watch for the animal in you, wander the muscle of my days for you after the pages have flamed. I gnash between hours of stir and stirring, throw my speech into a ball when my figure wants to climb out. Sometimes I want to scream. I want to smash the pottery and pour wax on the furniture. Sometimes I want to cut loose the animal in my cortex, tear into this ache. There is no such thing as new pain, only the same pain recycled a hundred ways. Sometimes innocence is a lie, a scheme invented to bury one's primal source, to pretend that nothing hounds me into dirt, deny poison that eats me deeper into gangrene of my days. Purity is all but plastic made in factories and shipped worldwide.

Your horns with every radiance will always make you more person than beast, more hunted than I will ever be. For a human to call out to a creature, part of the human must be creature, too.

Sometimes to pick striking lines from a poem feels like disclosing a spoiler. Beast You Are Who Calls to the Beast I Am is such a poem.
I mean how does Mai Der Vang do it, write gorgeous poetry after gorgeous poetry. Anyway, I'm so grateful for it and her new book Primordial (Graywolf, 2025)
📚💙

A page of Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway where most of the text has been obscured by collage elements, ink and colored pencil to reveal the following found poem: the sun was yawning/ its wicked things/ but why?/ everyone gives up something/ she could too/ All the little red and yellow flowers were making up stories by the river. Colors are blue green and gold giving the effect of islands in a sea-side landscape. Tiny red and yellow paper circles dot the foreground.

#ArtAdventCalendar day 7

Some visual/ found poetry using
Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway as a source text. I focused on pages with mentions of flowers for this project.