Susan Trofimow

Very much with @jacquiwine.bsky.social on this one 👇

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet @mosababutoha.bsky.social emphasizes the importance of hearing directly from Palestinians about what’s happening in Palestine.

'Aubade as Fuel' from LOVE PRODIGAL by Traci Brimhall (Copper Canyon Press)

"You know / I always need to save something, to control it."

'Aubade as Fuel' from LOVE PRODIGAL by Traci Brimhall (Copper Canyon Press) @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

Sheer brilliance 🤍

#poetry #poetrybooks #poetrycollections

Episode 19: I Guess It’s a Good Thing I Have a Therapy Appointment Tomorrow — Hey, It's Me Mike and Rachel talk about the promises we make when we have kids.

Hello, friends. There’s a new #HeyItsMe episode today, in which @rachzuck.bsky.social and I talk about how when we become parents, we make promises to our kids which are really promises to ourselves. www.heyitsmepodcast.com/episodes/epi...

Hawksbane There are things that cannot be written about, journeys That cannot be taken they are so sacred and long. There is no nature in eternity, no wind shift, no weeds. Whatever our vision, whatever our implement, We looked in the wrong places, we looked for the wrong things. We are not what is new, we are not what we have found.

Charles Wright

LAKE SAGANAGA And the whole time we fished, wishes lined up the way shadows refuse to. It ended up being the perfect time for them to do this: we were all still remembering ourselves as a family, and the light was as it is when you trust it will hold, good enough to know you may have had something but lost it. Certainty always stands closest to no thing we have.

More from Jill Osier ♥️

@bullcitypress.com

The Last Touch | Poetry Off the Shelf Alina Stefanescu on ruins, fear of flying, and life in the Romanian Republic of Alabama.

Grateful for this conversation with Helena, whose insights warmed my day. On my heresies, skies, and bylines. 🖤

poetry-off-the-shelf-87f4b310.simplecast.com/episodes/the...

GREY STONE II, 1961. I buy tears at the store for $11.99. When I tilt my head back to drop them in, I see the bottom of God’s shoes. I’m surprised by how dirty and used they are. Lately I see them pacing above me more and more. I can’t tell if God is here to get me, help me, or scold me. Agnes used a pencil to score her painting, as if to fix something. Very few things never need surgery. The sky, rain, the word happy. I hold so tightly on to my pencil that I take it to sleep with me. On some days, I see a flash of light from

my hand and fear it is happiness. I wave my hand wildly into the wind until the yellow pencil reappears. Yesterday, after seeing an Agnes painting in person, I decided to cut off my hand to save the pencil. It turns out my blood is white, the texture of gesso, and the pencil wasn’t the one that needed saving. What happens when you’re not supposed to be depressed? When depression becomes the form of your happiness? When your happiness is so sure of itself that it leaves only its form behind? Victoria Chang

“I buy tears at the store for $11.99. When I tilt my head back to drop them in, I see the bottom of God’s shoes. I’m surprised by how dirty and used they are.” — @victoriachang.bsky.social, “Grey Stone II, 1961”

WHEN I wonder now only when it will happen, when the young mother will hear the noise like somebody’s pressure cooker down the block, going off. She’ll go out in the yard, holding her small daughter in her arms, and there, above the end of the street, in the air above the line of the trees, she will see it rising, lifting up over our horizon, the upper rim of the gold ball, large as a giant planet starting to lift up over ours. She will stand there in the yard holding her daughter, looking at it rise and glow and blossom and rise, and the child will open her arms to it, it will look so beautiful.

Sharon Olds

You Want To Hold Everything In Place, But you can't hold it all. You can't keep time from crumbling, or everyone alive just by holding your breath. You can't stop sleep from covering the faces of your friends. Cheap motels, blood in the sink, nail clippings and hair dye— you can't hold it all. You can't keep the continents from shifting, or the deep wells of memory from going dry. Hold your breath. You can't stop sleep from erasing another day. The cold sweep of moonlight. Photographs. Your lover's thigh. You can't hold it all. You can't keep your hair from the drainpipe, or the beep of the alarm clock from telling another lie. Holding your breath can't stop sleep from burying this year and the next beneath a heap of fresh earth. These sparrows. This white sky. You can't hold it all. You can't keep holding your breath, but can't stop until you sleep. Matthew Olzmann

I taught this beautiful Matthew Olzmann poem "You Want To Hold Everything In Place, But" in the workshops I did during acute summer 2020 protest + pandemic years as the first thing we read, I hoped as a kind of pressure valve release. I've been sending it around a lot again lately.

Jon, Jill Lepore and @kevinmkruse.bsky.social discuss the many ways Trump has learned to entrench his power and how we may be able to fight back. An all-new The Weekly Show is out now!

I will be damned if I allow a bunch of Confederate-waving January 6th apologists give the American people a lecture on flag waving.

There is ZERO reason to enter an argument about patriotism with people who still worship traitors to America 150+ years later.

They. Are. Breaking. The. Law.

I know this is a ways off, but please save the date for this @sixteenrivers.bsky.social fundraiser with me and @kimaddonizio.bsky.social

Sunday, October 19, 2 to 5 pm
Sixteen Rivers Fall Fundraiser
Kim Addonizio and D. A. Powell
Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda, Berkeley, CA

The End of Girlhood What else can I say? The book opened like a future or a grave. I chose a wilder way through the woods, stalked by a mosquito whining for my heat. I chose a stranger's mouth because it rhymed with love, because it finished me off like a sentence. My throat like a hummingbird's, mistaken for a jewel. The kiss stuffing my mouth with smoke. There was a river, a thralling, how I trembled against my own hand. Of course what I remember most are the dangers of descent-gypsum flowers making a forest of the cave, its stones aching open like hands to receive the gifts— candles, photos, teacups, my torn hood. The spring dripped its steady syllables. Arise, arise. I was still myself after, but a new grief opened inside me like an umbrella. Gentle shield. Generous shadow. My knowledge made me soft and unmerciful. All three heads of the dog turned toward the sound of its name.

“The book opened / like a future or a grave.”

—Traci Brimhall, “The End of Girlhood” in LOVE PRODIGAL (Copper Canyon Press)

Parting There was a time I had no word for darkness, and so, I said, darkness. I had no word to say devotion, and so, I said, Two sons grieving one mother. A time came when our parents sat under a tree and sobbed for us, their sons on their way to a new country. When I try to return to my boyhood, sometimes I end up, a grown man, with my head on my mother's. lap.

More from Octavio Quintanilla

in THE BOOK OF WOUNDED SPARROWS (Texas Review Press)—a beautiful, beautiful collection 💙

LEGACY I think of the old pipes, how everything white in my house is rust-stained, and the gray-snouted raccoon who insists on using my attic as his pee pad, and certain sadnesses losing their edges, their sheen, their fur chalk-colored, look at that mound of laundry, that pile of pelts peeled away from the animal, and poems, skinned free of poets, like the favorite shoes of that dead girl now wandering the streets with someone else’s feet in them.

and poems,

Diane Seuss @dseuss.bsky.social

This poem will be available in an accessible online format at Poetry Magazine's website shortly. You'll also be able to listen to me read it.

Cover of Poetry Magazine's June 2025 issue: half-carton of eggs, with the letters P O E T R Y painted on them.

Feeling grateful (also floored) to turn to a page in Poetry Magazine & find this poem I wrote, with all admiration, after Mary Oliver's "When Death Comes."

Thank you, Adrian, Lindsay, Holly, et al.

NIH cancels its first and largest study centered on women The Women’s Health Initiative has produced numerous influential findings

NIH cancels its first and largest study centered on women

www.science.org/content/arti...

Papyrus Pantoum under a rising moon,       we step along a ridge of white sand—

Today's Featured Poem:

"Papyrus Pantoum" by Arthur Sze, from Into the Hush, published by Copper Canyon Press (@coppercanyonpress.bsky.social).

Read here:
poems.com/poem/papyrus...

speakupforjustice.law

W.S. Merwin

Two poems from my heresies in BOMB. — alina Ştefănescu I tried once before, years ago, to write about Malte, to someone who had been frightened by the book, that I myself sometimes thought of it as a hollow form, a negative mold, all the grooves and inden...

Two poems in @bombmag.bsky.social and a lot of meandering thoughts, with love and refusal of the binaries we are given, with resistance to the futures that rob us of all that is human, with poetry, my weapon. 🖤
www.alinastefanescuwriter.com/blog/2025/4/2/two-poems-from-my-heresies-in-bomb

This podcast is giving me much-needed faith in friendship and respectful conversation.

TOXIC There are pools of brine on the ocean floor. Brine is heavy water with a higher toxicity. The edge of a brine pool looks like another beach at the bottom of the sea. I have rooms like this in me. Poison up to my knees. I could drown eels, if I wanted. Sometimes I imagine if the worst thing I ever did was done to me instead.

“I have rooms like this in me.” A poem by Catherine Weiss.

Dark Enlightenment Rising: The Billionaire Experiment to Kill Democracy Trump, Musk, and their tech-bro overlords are engineering America’s authoritarian future...

Read this. Connect dots. Wake others.

open.substack.com/pub/thomhart...

I read this poem last night and folks sat UP and yes, always bring a poem and poet you love into the room with you 💙📚

I really admire this poem by Dane Holt. He takes that particular ‘flatness’ of grief and finds a playfulness within it… which is so hard! How on earth do you play with flatness? Like this:

SOTU seats are not assigned. There are general seating areas for each body (House, Senate, SCOTUS,etc) but there are honored seats for each party’s leadership and they’re even trying to squat those.

If it doesn’t sort out, be aware you may see applause on both sides of the aisle but they may be GOP

can't believe it's 2025 and i'm stressed about tariffs and measles, like am i a character in an american girl book