Sarah Alice

AFTER A DEATH Once there was a shock that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail. It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy. It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires. One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun through brush where a few leaves hang on. They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories. Names swallowed by the cold. It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat but often the shadow seems more real than the body. The samurai looks insignificant beside his armor of black dragon scales.

often the shadow seems more real than the body

“After A Death”, Tomas Tranströmer (tr. from Swedish by Robert Bly)

The Chateau Hardware It was always November there. The farms Were a kind of precinct; a certain control Had been exercised. The little birds Used to collect along the fence. It was the great “as though,” the how the day went, The excursions of the police As I pursued my bodily functions, wanting Neither fire nor water, Vibrating to the distant pinch And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.

wanting

John Ashbery

When a witch desires something that is not hers, she will slip it into her glove. An overwhelming power compels her to take something from a rich man's shelf. I have personally known a nervous young woman who often walked in her sleep. Isn't there something witchlike about a sleepwalker who wanders through the house with matches? The skin of a real witch makes a delicate binding for a book of common prayer. When all the witches in your town have been set on fire, their smoke will fill your mouth. It will teach you new words. It will tell you what you've done.

their smoke will fill your mouth

Elizabeth Willis, from “The Witch”💀

June Jordan, from “Poem at the Midnight of My Life”

#smallpoemsunday

Beset by a Disk of Radiating Feathers Barn owl, crossing the air over the road, dangerous softness of the owl allowing silent approach, favorite bird of Minerva, feeding on mice and small birds, fern owl, horned owl, how can I get one, a lady or person rambling a long way into the night, long tufted or mottle-tufted, neighbor to the one cat, never have seen one relaxing, not a falcon, an owlet, the owlishness of certain people, reputed wisdom of, on a small green bag of potato chips, snowy owl, a tamed owl goes hunting and relinquishes all that he kills, tawny owl, they say the Owle was a Bakers daughter, well known by its doleful hoot, what does an ow's egg look like, where are we going to live

the owlishness of certain people

Heather Christle, from PAPER CROWN

YouTube video by Star Wars Andor | Karis Nemik’s Manifesto | Disney+

I regret to inform you that Nemik's manifesto is the new Tom Holland “Umbrella.” You have to repost every time. It’s just where we are. #ihavefriendseverywhere

youtu.be/-asb8zTiuZ4?...

Who am I, I’ve said

Natalie Shapero, from STAY DEAD
#smallpoemsunday

the deep / rosined bow sound of the living

Dorianne Laux, “Cello”
#smallpoemsunday

Unhinged (complimentary)

BLACK-HANDED CURSE May the sky widen between your eyes and a storm twist across your thoughts. May the false images you create devour all you give birth to. May the false images you worship obscure love. May you look in the mirror and see the malignancy. May you writhe in dishonor. May you writhe hearing the voices of those you have dishonored. May you writhe knowing the whole of the pain you've caused others. May the limitations you impose on those more gifted than yourself steal the beats of your heart. May you be kept out of the heaven from which you have kept others. May no one hear your last words. May a small rodent eat your last words.

closing thoughts for James Dobson

Wanda Coleman, “Black-Handed Curse”

"ICE will run out of dildos before we run out of posterboard" is not a sentence I expected to ever write, but here we are.

Happy anniversary, Tom & Kristi!💛

Paige Lewis, “When I Tell My Beloved I Miss the Sun”
#smallpoemsunday

It Takes All Kinds by Laura Bandy She was the kind of girl you could pay to pet-sit and she would not snoop your drawers. He was the kind of boy who would flirt gently, tipsily, with moms and grandmas at weddings. She was the kind of…

the ways this Laura Bandy poem builds & culminates & evolves & shifts!!

"He was the kind of boy who could be trusted with detailed lists at the grocery store.
She was the kind of gel who could swoop your hair into architecturally interesting shapes."

https://www.havehashad.com/tpbx5

Anne Carson, from MEN IN THE OFF HOURS

#smallpoemsunday

A svelte ginger outside cat perched on a front porch tapping at the window.

new ginger bestie: (tap tap tap) Can I get in there? Earth’s haunted.

me: What?

ginger b: Earth’s haunted.

A generalization? Yes.
But the evidence is far far far from anecdotal, and so many of us are furious, and so many of us are sad, and so many of us will have less (health care & dignity & money & liveable futures) so that so few of us can have more.
Down with the selfish.
Up with the shared world.

Out of the spigot / streams a thirsty noncompliance

Diane Seuss, from “Coda”
#smallpoemsunday

Ha, oh man it really is! And what a great poem to teach

OMG, Jason doesn’t even know he’s an assassin yet. We’re so deep in the lore!!!

It’s going to be an incredible day. I’m making chicken nuggets.

American Dreaming Bootstraps like barnacles on boats. Bootstraps in blankets. Bootstraps in bibles. Bootstraps on bonnets bubbling up from the brook's bottom. Bootstraps make a slave's back bloom. Bootstraps in back rooms. Bootstraps cinched to shackles in the womb. Plumes of bootstraps billow and consume. Bootstrap nooses. Bootstrap bullets. Bootstrap bombs dropped on buildings from which blazing bodies blossom. Bootstraps dangling from coffins shaped like bassinets in which ankles fester and weep.

Ross Gay, “American Dreaming”

My strongest emotion is always, I don't know how I'm going to pay for my time here. Why should that be the human feeling You are interpreting sensations someone had thousands of years ago A drunken theater of surgeons operating on your eye and other auto parts. The man says, Knock the visual frame into a new place. Everything's blurry for an instant but this isn't my eye. Under the sky bombing your old dark house somewhere, and the pipes installed by pioneers, was I one, this is what it's like to dream, to have access to all these stories and be in one unquestionably. At the same time I arrive. They said I transformed you terribly by showing you texts of a radical ecstasy; this is my story. I am becoming your eyes. -Alice Notley

this is what it’s like to dream, to have access to all these stories and be in one unquestionably.

–Alice Notley🖤

putty colored water bottle featuring a black and white sticker with text stating “intentionally blank”

new candid of my heart

💔

An errant yellow tulip among the shrubbery, displaced and thriving.

Yellow goblins and a god I can swallow: Eyes in the evergreens under ice. Interior monologue and some voice. Weary fears, the usual trials and a place to surmise blessedness.

Fanny Howe, “Yellow Goblins”

The long, the short, the difficult minutes of night where even in darkness there is no horizon without a tree just a boat's light in the leaves Last footstep before formlessness

Michael Ondaatje, from “House on a Red Cliff”

The first word wasn’t love, was it?

Alina Stefanescu, from her incredible new collection, MY HERESIES
#smallpoemsunday

ETHICS In ethics class so many years ago our teacher asked this question every fall: if there were a fire in a museum which would you save, a Rembrandt painting or an old woman who hadn't many years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs caring little for pictures or old age we'd opt one year for life, the next for art and always half-heartedly. Sometimes the woman borrowed my grandmother's face leaving her usual kitchen to wander some drafty, half imagined museum. One year, feeling clever, I replied why not let the woman decide herself? Linda, the teacher would report, eschews the burdens of responsibility. This fall in a real museum I stand before a real Rembrandt-old woman, or nearly so, myself. The colors within this frame are darker than autumn, darker even than winter—the browns of earth, though earth's most radiant elements burn through the canvas. I know now that woman and painting and season are almost one and all beyond saving by children.

Sarah, the teacher would report, eschews / the burdens of responsibility.

Linda Pastan, “Ethics”

Perhaps more of a coven situation🐦‍⬛

Sepia-toned early spring tree with bare branches covered in perching inky crows, one in flight smudging the sky.

another murder

whew, I feel that🖤