A tiny hand reaches out from a pile of roadside leaves think of the next American body in song the sound and its trenchcoat flashing the hills, clouds carving their way out of morning and later sprouting from inside a buckeye with the patience of a camp councilor
Noah Falco from Homemade Engines From A Dream
#smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social
"Réka Nyitrai’s poems radiate with strange wonder. They hold their breath in Dada’s river and float like dream engines of the chaotic, simultaneously haunted and hilarious. Recommended for those who already know that the 'smell of burnt snow / wakes the stars'." - Noah Falck
“Réka Nyitrai’s poems radiate with strange wonder” 🪄
We can’t wait for this double release: Split / Game of Little Deaths by Réka Nyitrai. This poetic & magical blurb by @noahfalck.bsky.social couldn’t be more on-the-nose
Check out this "In Gratitude" project we launched in Buffalo inspired by the poems of Ross Gay.
www.justbuffalo.org/announcing-i...
POEM EXCLUDING ANSWERS Someone spends her entire life dreaming of how it will end. It makes her sad. We sail a small boat within her heart and discover another heart, though it looks more like a moon lit from within by a single exploding bottle rocket.
Noah Falck, “Exclusions”
#smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social
Incredibly excited about the release of a limited-edition lathe-cut vinyl titled “Fatigue Performance." The record is a collaboration with the band Plant Water and the artist Ariel Aberg-Riger.
Preorders now available ACTUAL BOOKS
actualbooks.bigcartel.com/product/fati...
we are remembering a cold day in 1986 when pigeons, deafened by moon-echoes broke our windows and everything felt like a bell's inside
Noah Falck & Matt McBride
@noahfalck.bsky.social
The Baffler no. 80 is now available online and in print.
“American Vendetta” considers our grudges and grievances: blood feuds and broadsides, lawsuits and gang wars, and the racist paranoia driving immigration policy.
Start reading now.
Congratulations to all the winners and finalists! Especially @officialmchangpoet.bsky.social, @amythatcher.bsky.social, Sara Lupita Olivares, and Buffalo’s own @noahfalck.bsky.social
nationalpoetryseries.org/congratulati...
Today’s poem is selected by Noah Falck (@noahfalck.bsky.social) as part of the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry.
“Not Horses” appeared in Hard Child by Nathalie Shapero, published by Copper Canyon, 2017. Shared here with deep gratitude.
An excerpt of "Lake" by Noah Falck
A photo of Noah Falck
“Today’s poem acknowledges the beauty we have—the view we have. It also mourns the beauty that would exist without our interference. Holding space for both is a feat of empathy and imagination,” shares @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social.
Read “Lake” by @noahfalck.bsky.social: bit.ly/3ULVbMC
Today’s Featured Poem:
“We Came Here to Get Away from You” by @donikakelly.bsky.social from The Natural Order of Things published by @graywolfpress.bsky.social
Read here:
spare.poems.com/poem/we-came...
Thrilled about this little poem/film made by the good people @justbuffalolit.bsky.social of me reading my poem "Silo" inside of...a silo! Thanks @noahfalck.bsky.social and the whole Silo City team.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W2G...
Graham Foust reading poems for the June 28, 2025 Silo City Reading Series in Buffalo, NY
📸: Pat Cray
Silo City Reading Series 2025.
Details & tickets: www.justbuffalo.org/upcoming-sil...
Poster design by Joel Brenden
After Eric Aho’s Ice Cut (1933) at the AKG
by Noah Falck
There was a square hole in the floor.
There was a storm.
There was a line between the corner of the sky
and the nowhere else.
Then a blue that became
you looking at you.
THE POEM by David Ignatow I want something dancing and screaming in front of me, calling itself a poem.
from The Animal in the Bush by David Ignatow (The Slow Loris Press, 1977)
A Study of Three Crows by Larry Levis Three crows in a high tree In April Possess heaven. It is in their black feathers Shining like mud, Or it is nowhere. At the town's edge, Where the fumes are eternal, They feed on garbage, Or fly up slowly, Having fed, to overlook toys In yards with no grass — Their voices the sound of tools Being sharpened In some garage in the suburbs. Crows are the color of soil After long rain ... They strut back and forth, Owning it all. And their gold eyes, When looked at closely, shine Without any character. They have been here a long time, Rolling their r's, and waiting. Behind them, it is night. The stars are All in their places.
from The Dollmaker's Ghost by Larry Levis
(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1992)
One more day to submit.
justbuffaloliterarycenter.submittable.com/submit/31319...
Hey Adam,
I believe there is flexibility for the residency. The selected fellow can share their projected timeline and we will work with them the best we can. ✌️
Applications are now open for the 2025 Just Buffalo Literary Center Poetry Fellowship. Come write + read in Buffalo in August. Share your work inside a grain silo alongside Donika Kelly at the Silo City Reading Series. Details in link.
www.justbuffalo.org/apply-for-th...
from Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle I get so very tired of having to talk about literature. I didn’t begin writing because I wanted to sit in a room and talk about the construction of subjectivity in Wordsworth and Ashbery; I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back and say yes, house, bridge, river, hair, no maybe, never, forever.
from MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012) by Mary Ruefle
💯
Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem by Matthew Olzmann So here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage might work: Because you wear pink but write poems about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell at your keys when you lose them, and laugh, loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol, gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming. You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents of what you packed were written inside the boxes. Because you think swans are overrated and kind of stupid. Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence. Because you underline everything you read, and circle the things you think are important, and put stars next to the things you think I should think are important, and write notes in the margins about all the people you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.
from MEZZANINES (Alice James Books, 2013) by Matthew Olzmann
Weather Forecast by Linda Pastan Somewhere it is about to snow, if not in the northern suburbs, then in the west, if not there, then here. And the wind which is camouflaged now by the perfect stillness of trees will make some weathercock dizzy with its fickle breath. In the blood's failing heat we wait for the verdict of snow. You bite into an apple with the sound boots make crunching through the first icy layers. The whites of your eyes are cold. The moons of your nails are frozen mounds. A single match striking against the bottom of a shoe is our only prayer.
from CARNIVAL EVENING by Linda Pastan (Norton, 1998)
Dear Reader by James Tate I am trying to pry open your casket with this burning snowflake. I'll give up my sleep for you. This freezing sleet keeps coming down and I can barely see. If this trick works we can rub our hands together, maybe start a little fire with our idenification papers. I don't know but I keep working, working half hating you, half eaten by the moon.
from HELL, I LOVE EVERYBODY by James Tate edited by Dara Barrois/Dixon, Emily Pettit, and Kate Lindroos (Ecco, 2023)
River by John Ashbery It thinks itself too good for These generalizations and is Moved on by them. The opposite side Is plunged in shade, this one In self-esteem. But the center Keeps collapsing and re-forming The couple at a picnic table (but It's too early in the season for picnics) Are traipsed across by the river's Unknowing knowledge of its workings To avoid possible boredom and the stain Of too much intuition the whole scene Is walled behind glass. "Too early," She says, "in the season." A hawk drifts by. "Send everyone back to the city."
from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery (Penguin Books, 1975)
Nature Is Art by Sara Nicholson Despair desires despair; desire Despairs of desiring. Despair despairs Of ever again desiring to desire Despair, while desire desires A form: a garden in the orthodox Narrative, flowering ex nihilo From April to October in the Roman De la Rose, the Belle Epoque. But what would happen if desire Abandoned desire, desiring In lieu of desire despair, an elegy That would suffice to burn The garden down? It was desire Despair desired until desire Fell into despair, built a replica Of the garden it had only just Yesterday burned: a copy of a copy Now lost, complete with fake Flowers. Not a fire, but gold leaf.
from APRIL by Sara Nicholson (The Song Cave, 2023)
BELOW FREEZING by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly We are at a party which doesn’t love us. Finally the party lets the mask fall and shows what it is: a shunting station for freight cars. In the fog cold giants stand on their tracks. A scribble of chalk on the car doors. One can’t say it aloud, but there is a lot of repressed violence here. That is why the furnishings seem so heavy. And why it is difficult to see the other thing present: a spot of sun that moves over the house walls and over the unaware forest of flickering faces, a biblical saying never let down: “Come unto me, for I am as full of contradictions as you” I work the next morning in a different town. I drive there in a hum through the dawning hour which resembles a dark blue cylinder. Orion hangs over the frost. Children stand in a silent clump, waiting for the school bus, the children no one prays for. The light grows as gradually as our hair.
from SELECTED POEMS by Tomas Tranströmer edited by Robert Hass (Ecco Books, 2000)
Poem Excluding Shower Scene The entire world is room temperature. Sunlight bleeds over the city, and the mallwalkers gather to form a sort of nervous system or fatigue performance, we say. Consumers storm the sale racks. It sounds more and more like like music through pregnant skin. And today every child is born into whatever space is available. We wait for snowfall — maybe learn another language. A language built around the idea of far, far away.
Thinking of those mallwakers today. From my last book, Exclusions (Tupelo Press, 2020)
