Thanks very much for reading & sharing this one, Matt!
10.02.2026 22:14
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Thanks very much for reading & sharing this one, Matt!
"Under a sky too blue / to look at, he watched a little one // eat from off the ground something he knew / should not be eaten"
Wonderful essence of the philosophical in this poem from @briansimoneau.bsky.social in @havehashad.com
"Mostly he found it uncomfortable
to sit on a plank so long in the sun.
He’d expected bulls and broncos, not
schoolkids roping goats..."
today from Brian Simoneau!
https://www.havehashad.com/c26lg
“he clapped when we clapped, game / for chaos to come so someone else // could tame it”
Excited to have a new poem, “The Man at His First Rodeo,” at @havehashad.com
Excited & grateful for my poem “Every Poem About This Season Now Becomes a Lie” to appear in this outstanding new issue of @whaleroadreview.bsky.social
"There are so many ways to fail at this, day
after day so many ways I fail to see
coming. It's a statue, I say, he's not real,
but what echoes up the shaft of history
is hunger"
-- Brian Simoneau, "Mercy," at @versedaily.bsky.social
www.versedaily.org/2025/mercy.s...
thanks very much!
The first 8 lines of my poem “Mercy” on Verse Daily: Today's poem is by Brian Simoneau Mercy —St. Mawes Castle, Cornwall The moat beneath us gone to garden, sea rose and Cornish heather, the old guardhouse peddling ice cream and trinkets, we crouch through a doorframe and notice wood and stone engraved to flatter the king whose coffers built this little fortress protecting the harbor and its deep-water inland passage. A stairway curls down the wall and a hole in the floor makes my daughter scream:
Happy to see my poem “Mercy” featured on @versedaily.bsky.social over the weekend! Please click through if you’d like to read about my daughter’s moment of terror in a 16th-century castle: www.versedaily.org/2025/mercy.s...
Many, many thanks to @jpdancingbear.bsky.social for featuring my poem at Verse Daily over the weekend!
On a desk, a paperback book of poems: Failures of the Poets, Anthony Robinson.
"I AM THE KING OF INFINITE SPACE" We were young & we were shattered. We took our lives & we settled down. "I like your town & your trees & your bodies of water" the way the music drains out across a field. No vision here. The house we built no more than a maintenance shack. Insect shells. Dry road. No visions. I don't believe I understand. God was happening all at once & even though we didn't believe, he made us good in the wind, made us something big & dead & so comes love, so comes this anniversary. So comes again up, empty, open on the face of the waters. Open across the breadth of the sea.
Anthony Robinson, “I Am the King of Infinite Space,” Failures of the Poets (Canarium Books, 2023)
#sealeychallenge
#thesealeychallenge
On a desk, with a #2 pencil, a paperback book: Useful Junk, poems, Erika Meitner, with the cover art “Masculine Still Life” by Genesis Belanger.
Invitation to Tender My friend Danielle tells me to use a slightly more capacious we in my poems & I look up capacious: ample, roomy, vast, immense & think of the church marquee across from Publix: God is real & loves you since the you is all of us & we don't deserve this enormous Earth. Along the beach here people walk the wrack line, heads bowed or plant themselves on their knees in one spot searching for washed-up shark teeth in the shell hash. Our configurations of attention are sometimes surprising— is it capitalism or adoration that tells us we can inhabit anything? There are many ways to participate in (egress from?) this world. See the molten sun dropping into the Gulf? The lightning
in the distance blinking the clouds, trying to warn us? There are still loggerhead nests roped off with tri- angulated wood stakes & orange caution tape though just today the Endangered Species Act was weakened to clear the way for mining & drilling & development. Every day at dawn volunteers walk the beach to count hatchlings, release any left behind into the Gulf so they don't get eaten by predators. If there is an invitation to tender it is written in drift toys & sea glass—dunnage swept in by the tide & left right at our feet. We can all procure. We can all excavate. We can all strip down to our softest parts & (satisfy the client) make our best offer.
Erika Meitner, “Invitation to Tender” from Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022)
#sealeychallenge
#thesealeychallenge
![On a desk with a #2 pencil, a paperback book with [Matthew Henriksen] [The Absence of Knowing] printed in a sans serif font on a sky-blue rectangle on a white background.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ndufjoagfi4tmyt5vgvrz6yp/bafkreiehmlcfduvxn7kfesyafzzarlfrkpney5ptn6g5pecy6xugx5uqaq)
On a desk with a #2 pencil, a paperback book with [Matthew Henriksen] [The Absence of Knowing] printed in a sans serif font on a sky-blue rectangle on a white background.
Requiem for Now Try I tell myself Not to impose a narrative When I cannot see where my wife looks in a mirror Our first plan belonged to us Our daughter protests for eggs Her feet tiny heart bird claws Our second plan belonged to marriage Where blood circles the moon We liked to live in the open parts of plants I don't need to tell a story My daughter laughs out a window's mouth Talks like trying to count the air Her repetition wringing worry out
Matthew Henriksen, “Requiem For Now” from The Absence of Knowing (Black Ocean, 2015)
#thesealeychallenge
As we go off the cliff, I’m taking some books with me, including Maria Zoccola’s Helen of Troy 1993. Check it out, and her roundup in Electric Literature of poetry books that build immersive worlds, apocalyptic and otherwise, with a nice mention of Ceive. electricliterature.com/9-poetry-col...
IN LIVING SILENCE If to be human is a conflux of apparitions then the tongue slides out of the mouth & waves once before disappearing around the corner
Keith Abbott
Promotional graphic for the Pen Parentis Literary Salon featuring Marcia LeBeau, Taté Walker, Brian Simoneau, and Christina Cook, Tuesday, January 14, at 7pm ET.
If you’re looking for a break from the heaviness of these weeks, please consider joining me, Christina Cook, Marcia LeBeau, & Taté Walker for the Pen Parentis Literary Salon tomorrow, Tuesday January 14, at 7pm ET. We’ll be reading a few poems and talking about our writing & parenting experiences.
Honored to have a poem featured on The Slowdown podcast today -- www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2024...
there are
tears which happen in a day
that it would take
a lifetime to explain.
—Mary Ruefle, from “Trollope”
ALLOWABLES I killed a spider Not a murderous brown recluse Nor even a black widow And if the truth were told this Was only a small Sort of papery spider Who should have run When I picked up the book But she didn't And she scared me And I smashed her I don't think I'm allowed To kill something Because I am Frightened
I remember the first time I read Nikki Giovanni’s “Allowables” — being overcome by the extraordinary thing she taught me about my own fear, its murderousness. And she did this not by standing above me, but by turning quietly and saying: see what we did?
::A Journey It’s a journey . . . that I propose . . . I am not the guide . . . nor technical assistant . . . I will be your fellow passenger . . . Though the rail has been ridden . . . winter clouds cover . . . autumn’s exuberant quilt . . . we must provide our own guideposts . . . I have heard . . . from previous visitors . . . the road washes out sometimes . . . and passengers are compelled . . . to continue groping . . . or turn back . . . I am not afraid . . . I am not afraid . . . of rough spots . . . or lonely times... I don’t fear . . . the success of this endeavor . . . I am Ra . . . in a space . . . not to be discovered . . . but invented . . . I promise you nothing . . . I accept your promise . . . of the same we are simply riding . . . a wave . . . that may carry . . . or crash . . . It’s a journey . . . and I want . . . to go . . .
RIP Nikki Giovanni 💜 my favorite poem of hers, one I shared with my students every year
All of our books are on sale for $10!!! Snag them today, before our holiday sale ends! (Note, Another Life by Frances Klein will ship late January 2025!)
riotinyourthroat.com/book-catalog/
Circle of books graphic and the text: Buy a small press book today
Y’all we have a recommendation and it is that you buy at least ONE book directly from a small press today—not bookshop, not Amazon. Help keep small presses open.
@juneroadpress.bsky.social @sundresspub.bsky.social @bellepointpress.bsky.social @lightscatterpress.bsky.social @bullcitypress.com
thanks very much for sharing, Rebecca!
The Abyssal Zone Sometimes it's seaweed in your throat you can't cough out or an inkeloud expanding in your skull. Sometimes it's primal like the force of an oyster making a pearl to protect itself after a harvester surgically implants its poison, or the heart growing a tumor that can't be extracted without killing you, or pressure crushing your lungs to fists deep underwater. Sometimes, you sink so far down from the sun your tongue bloats like an anglerfish floating in a well, lost, unable to breathe or speak, but each day you feel it trying to say something about the shining dead language it once knew, watch its cells burst into blue specks of light when you open your mouth. A tiny syllable. Then darkness again. But each time a little bluer, a little more like the home you've forgotten, my stranger looking back at me from the mirror, just wanting me to reach through and hold you.
Lazarus Through the mist I see as the first mammals once saw through their forests, dark photons translating matter into shape: shadowflower, shadowstone, the ripple of bees and their shadowblood weeping inside the trees. My first eye stares back at mine and into my chest pours a weight, an infinite pressure inside my heart or left lung like an extinction echoing backward into the first cell of its animal, my body colder in that spot. A thumbprint blooms between my breasts where a stranger once pressed and being so alone I open like a grave.
Sara Eliza Johnson, “The Abyssal Zone” & “Lazarus” from Vapor (Milkweed Editions, 2022)
Yet another reason I love @blacklawrence.bsky.social: the editors are donating $1 to the ACLU for every book sold on the Black Lawrence Press website through the end of 2024 (including my poetry collection No Small Comfort)
Walk with me down the block. Notice the rows of maples, perfectly straight, evenly spaced from the road and one another, precise lines running yard to yard, remainder of careful plans, prosperity's spread to what once was forest, once farm—every golden age remade over and over, parceled out and subdivided when footpath turned bridleway turned turnpike turned trolley turned traffic. History sped up with each expanding step but look: I have found in my house a spot where, lying on the floor, I can see no other house, no poles, no wires stretching away along the road, no road at all but only tree, only sky, bare limbs framed in my window the way the first name on the deed thought his prospect would always stay unchanged in all the ways it changed with him. We can utter our every wish and scrutinize all the old maps, but we must come to understand there is never a going back and too: future versions of us will walk this very block (ruins unearthed from layers of fallout or avenue of steeples, steel and glass) and they will imagine
this moment of chalk-drawn sidewalks and mulch-bordered lawns, worthy days to recall, a glimpse of something a new angle might help them find.
My poem “Suburban Eclogue” from issue 42 of Post Road
The cover of issue 42 of Post Road: cover art is “Restored to Mint” by Vincent Dion, a photo of a pale blue 1970s-ish Chevy that’s been junked—shattered windows, hood detached, front tire lying among weeds and wildflowers in the foreground.
Honored & grateful to learn the editors at Post Road have nominated my poem “Suburban Eclogue” for a Pushcart Prize:
www.postroadmag.com/2024/04/22/4...
Poems remind us of our humanity because, sometimes, the lines break. Just like humans do.
And what comfort to know you can break and still be understood.
ALL IT TAKES Any force— generosity, sudden updraft. Fear. Things invisible, and the visible effects by which we know them. Human gesture. Betrayed, betrayed. The dampness of fog as understandable by how, inside it, from within their thicket of nowhere left to hide— that leafless the winter berries, more than usual, shine. First always comes the ability to believe, and then the need to. The ancient Greeks; the Romans after. How they made of love a wild god; of fidelity— a small, a tame one. I am no less grateful for the berries than for the thorns that are meant, I think, to help. As if sometimes the world really did amount to a quiet arrangement. Cut flowers. Make death the one whose eyes are lidless. And —already— you are leaving. You have crossed the water.
“I am no less grateful for / the berries than for the thorns that are // meant, I think, to help”
—Carl Phillips, “All It Takes” from The Rest of Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004)
