once in a while i am reminded I am not at the center of anything. Seen at a distance I am hardly seen. Excruciating, how here I am, how little it means. I use my mouth to make sounds which approximate my innermost thoughts but often bungle it. I use my eyes when I need to be understood. Sometimes I tell the truth but only when I think I'll be valued for being interesting instead of good. I marvel at what I call my life—ambulances, sparrows, clouds passing definitively by—amazed that it doesn't know it's mine at all. the minor characters don't look up, the narrative sags, and I each moment wondering if this is when the real story starts.

once in a while i am reminded / leila chatti

The sky flashes and the great sea. The wind rises and the great ses and there is no way to undo it. It swells and lashes. I clutched the rail at the side of the bed and stared at the wall. Drift is a sea word. Adjust for drift. Start turning your boat now. I sat in the boat and the sky cracked open. It might as well have. I sat in the boat and velled at che waves. I might as well have. I strung the words and everything under the shattered clouds in sentences. Bv which I mean, which is to say, the wine-dark sea. It bruises where the oars strike. Hitched step, stitched thought. What it is and where it wants to go. Someone needs to knot the rope. Someone needs to finish it, a single thought completely. That it could follow. That there could be a rosy- fingered, wine-dark sea consequently breaking. I am the mermaids singing, twisted in the sheets. I am, I have, I know and say. I know, I have, I will and do. Whitecaps and froth. I yelled at the waves. The ghost of myself slept deep. Try to finish, finish the thought. Do not drop anchor here. That it could follow, that there could be a word and then another. I recalibrated and the light streaming completely down in shifts. Pull yourself out. I clutched the rail at the side of the bed all night, the light stuttering against the waves. What trips over terms in the names dragged up and knocking things over with the names of other things between the swells. The fingered dawn. The terrible shore. The complicated mooring.

the waves / richard siken

Climbing into bed, you hear a car start: It sounds like a machine gun in a garbage can. A light blinks off, and the ceiling's faint blue glow like the way your teeth looked in blacklight, in your friend's cellar. at sixteen ceases. Say a woman walked up to you in a deli and said "You look like someone who pays taxes." Could you figure it? Maybe you look responsible staring at smoked salmon, chicken salad, tins of snuff. Maybe not. Maybe you're innocently waiting for the mailman And you get arrested for sneezing. Maybe you go home with someone and they beat you to death with a box of Cheerios. How about the Old Chance Meeting with Unrequited Love: In Person: One Night Only. The snappy chatter, the stuttering, like a TV commercial for anxiety and ecstasy, all smashed up in one. Vodka doesn't help. It gets late. You both go home. Why can't this get any simpler? I mean "this" in a vague fashion, you know the gesture: Hands fanning out in the general direction of lamps, telephones, Scrabble, dying flamingos The late Beethoven quartets, rock and roll, Chocolate ice cream and sex. You know the rest. Sometimes all you want is a little sleep, especially the ream about a mysterious place where elevators go sideways, and you're always flying seven feet above the ground, heading somewhere else.

old story / robert long

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away. The mystic Simon Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, "Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated." For Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all we hardly know our own depths. -- Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

i think about this quote constantly, and since i'm thinking of it again, i'm sharing it again! "I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective [desire] could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance?"

Lies about sea creatures Ada Limon I lied about the whales. Fantastical blue water-dwellers, big, slow moaners of the coastal. I never saw them. Not once that whole frozen year. Sure, I saw the raw white, gannets hit the waves so hard, it could have been a showy blow hole. But I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes, you just want something so hard, you have to lie about it, so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute, how real hunger has a real taste. Someone once told me, gannets, those voracious sea birds of the North Atlantic chill, go blind from the height and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a lie. Gannets never go blind and they certainly never die.

i don't get why people ask "how do you identify AI in writing?" if they're just going to make up an excuse for whatever people reply with lmaoooo

Image of the forest gnome woman Jezza, all three eyes open, tongue out bearing a substance that is causing patterned visuals.

Evocation is the wildest school of magic. Primal. Ancient. To most it seems a primordial mess of chaos and power; power to be used for more refined spellcraft.

Most don't see it for the kaleidoscope of color and feeling that it truly is.

🎨: @sillychaotic.bsky.social

2025:square woop!🟦

#1日1ウパー

Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward (Among them Nora and Henry III) Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, "Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night." You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along.

by gwendolyn brooks

If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions. It doesn’t bother me that the word ‘stone’ appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that 'wind’ and 'gray’ appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn’t use them that often I’d be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable. In fact, most poets write the same poem over and over. Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost's statement that he tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it couldn't be.

excerpt from the triggering town / richard hugo

you know that one tweet that's like "if you don't know what happens next in your fanfic, might i suggest FINGERS IN MOUTH"? so obviously they're right but another life hack is: someone needs to hook a finger through someone else's belt loop. do it. finger in belt loop. tug. it's hot every time

In the dark I try every language you might recognize, but nothing calls you back; the words hang in the air, their own brief phantoms. The ocean offers no solace; I stand at its black edge as it retreats, draws close, backs away again. Like this, your memory wavers on the threshold. How many nights your name appeared on my lips like an incantation, how many times you’ve arrived in a dream pale as prayer at dawn—your absence burns its hole through my waking. I stalk the shores of your sleep, which allow no entry. The moon reveals nothing of heaven, a brined window. You are gone, in this country and all others.

excerpt from night lament in hergla / leila chatti

"What a great time for creatives to harness and use world events."

Yeah man, I feel so inspired and motivated right now by the enshittification of everything.

Annunciation I have come to accept the story of my own obedience—how I waited not knowing I was waiting, ear obliging, body poised. You sent a man I could not look at fully, or touch, he was a flame which spoke, and I could not be afraid—as it's told, I rose as instinctive as a dove startled into flight, blue veil fluttering floorward and tongue unglued—May it be done to me, I said, and it was done so quickly, I thought to say it meant I had some say, but it was preordained—the breath barely out of my body before my mind had changed.

annunciation / leila chatti

richard siken fauna There is something wrong with the deer. It is not all right. It has caught its leg in a length of something. They cut it free and let it go but you can tell it is not all right. It might never be all right. Call it a myth and the truth grows abstract. Call it a lie and the truth is a doubled fact. My stepmother’s father was an Elk. We would go to the lodge to eat roast beef and watch him butt heads with the other Elks. Sometimes he would raise a glass in praise and we would clap. Sometimes he would remember and we would bow our heads. The Elks fought in the war to end tyranny. They left, they fought, and they came back. They are not all right. Once, I drove to the end of the world. It was in Los Angeles. Someone had posted a sign. It read No U-turn. Parking $5. The beach was nice. I wrote you a letter in case I died but I threw it away. It was good practice. We have to practice losing everything. We are deer, we are headlights. We are the road where they collide.

fauna / richard siken

richard siken devonian forest The beginning of a story is a dangerous place. Anything can happen. The first noun makes a pledge, a mark on the ledger, and things begin their forward motion. The land is covered in moss. The fish are still in the water, though they dream of legs. This is the past: spores, gills, fins. No roots or leaves. Then birds cloud the skies, giant animals conquer the land, the sea peoples go to war on an ocean so vast it’s useless to talk about and soon enough someone’s drinking whiskey sours on the patio alone. I was drinking whiskey sours on the patio alone. I was drinking whiskey sours on the patio alone, I wrote. It wasn’t true. I didn’t even drink back then. The beginning of a story—it isn’t the beginning, there’s always something that comes before. The first word in the Book of Genesis, in Hebrew, starts with B. It’s

cautionary. It’s primordial. You have to be careful, things want to happen. Everything is leading up to something all the time. I painted the kitchen red. I did it because he told me not to. I roasted yellow peppers on the blue flame of the stove in the red kitchen. I planted sunflowers under the windows for my birthday. By summer they were tall as ghosts. I am leaving out parts. I am changing the details. I thought that I could write it down and then erase it if I had to but it left a hole. It didn’t track. The incongruities betrayed me. The trail fades, the clearing evaporates. Forest for miles. I said ghosts. They point, these nouns. They promise something. Poppyseed—his favorite dressing. Sunday mornings—I’m the one who ruined them. They pulled whole chapters from the Bible. Someone did. I’m not against it, they were contradictory, they made it confusing: a third glass on the table, an extra hand, too many shadows on the wall.

devonian forest / richard siken

jasmine khaliq postcard before i forgive you i was in real need. i was eating raspberries and nothing else. i wrote love poems for everyone but you. you weren't yourself, or you were; i hated the careless way you drove. shouldn't real penance take forever? i stayed all day alone in one line, for hours walking past hydrangeas, walking past hydrangeas.

postcard before i forgive you / jasmine khaliq

me: writing is my place of comfort.

me: I am going to write a book that is so discomforting...

i fear this is account is just going to be my poetry obsession in motion

[Image description: a poem titled Maybe If I Rip A Few Things Apart With My Teeth, I’ll Feel Better. It’s by Schuyler Peck. The title is in all caps, and the poem is in all lowercase. The poem reads: to snarl and gnaw, bite and bark from the back of my throat; claw with the grip of all ten fingers. I dress the altar with offerings, a pomegranate, the crusted rind of sourdough, a lover’s bloodied shoulder; take every book in the house by either side of its jaw, and crack the knuckle of its binding, but oh, I am nothing if not insatiable. won’t you trust me? my canted smile in the dark, my promise to protect what’s precious. yes, what sparkling porcelain; what clean white walls. how thick are the windows? how close are the neighbors? hand me your tender. I’m craving to ruin. End description.]

how thick are the windows? / how close are the neighbors?

i want to find you a peach so ripe that even your breath would bruise it. i want to press its velvet heat against your cheek, make you edge into the bite until your mouth is too wet to ask questions. if something happens let it. -paige lewis, from "pavlov was the son of a priest," space struck

excerpt from pavlov was the son of a priest / paige lewis

Picture of Tim Robinson holding his head with the text that reads “(laughs] I'm just trying to understand here.”

When one minute you’re struggling to get through January and the next minute it’s about to be June

"what's your writing process like?"

my writing process:

Getting stuck while we're writing is a feature, not a bug. It's the point of the exercise. It's what happens when we are trying to express something we have not expressed before. That friction forces us to make the tools we need to understand and express it. Getting stuck is how we make meaning.

can i be so for real with you guys, this book kept me up until 2am and i wanted to throw up after reading it

⭐⭐⭐⭐.25

me: CAN YOU PLEASE LOCK IN AND BE CREATIVE WHEN I HAVE TIME TO ACTUALLY CREATE AND NOT WHEN I'M BUSY OR AT 2AM???

my brain: lmao no.

all of your jinkook reccs are giving me life!!!

a couple of people standing next to each other with a red circle between them ALT: a couple of people standing next to each other with a red circle between them

god i saw that and insta-retweet. certain people open their mouth and my vicinity and it's just immediately