Advance notice 😊

Foreplay Oh, his sweet, small cuss. "Shit, sorry I kneed you," he said, pausing to check for a bruise. "I know you need me," I grinned, having never been sexy, only clever, even if it meant bending the truth. Then he pressed his fist to my chest, kneading me. Sometimes when I am dead to language I remember this.

Mitchell Jacobs Rogue Astronaut

Ohh good! I've been waiting for this to be a book and now it's a book. Check out Rogue Astronaut by @mitchelljacobs.bsky.social

Making a Sound Like Darkness If it weren't immodest, I'd say modesty's one of the few things left about me that I can almost admire, still, except it's hardly a thing worth caring one way or another about, to have been who one is. Look at the trees, not trying at all to be anyone's idea of flourishing without an instinct to make what can't be held holdable: the struggling first; the bit of hush, just after; then the longer shadows getting cast by everything I remember wanting.

Another remarkable poem by Carl Phillips from our winter issue

UNFOLDING If there is no spirit unfolding itself in history, No gradual growth of consciousness Beneath the land grabs and forced migrations, The bought elections, the betrayal of trust By party faction in the name of progress- What about spirit in the personal realm Unfolding slowly inside us, so slowly That our best days seem like a holding action? Seasons repeat themselves, but the tree Shading the yard keeps growing. Don't be chagrined that the sadness you felt This evening beside the bed of a friend Who's growing weaker wasn't more profound Than the sadness of yesterday, that you still Can't imagine a fraction of what he's feeling As the world he loves slips from his grasp. No progress from your perspective, But who's to say what you might notice If the scroll of the last few months were unrolled On the table before you, how clear it might be That your your understanding of all you're losing In losing him has been slowly deepening? Another day, you say to yourself, at dusk As you climb your porch steps, which you notice Could use some scraping and painting this weekend, A fresh coat that with luck will last a year. --Carl Dennis

SO many great poems in these old issues of The New Yorker

A MARRIAGE His paintings were small, suggestions of houses, pinpricks of green for trees. She'd set her glass down, say, Paint like you're blind, from memory and passion— two words he especially didn't care for. She'd say, Paint like you're on fire. But their house was already burning, and he was going blind and deaf. So he'd carry the painting back down to the basement, resume with his thinnest sable brush. He would never touch her the way she wanted, though she kept asking him to, like this, in front of everybody. — Julie Bruck

A heartbreaking poem by one of Canada's finest

Golgotha Emma Bolden Flayed flat, a lion, a night burnished bright. There was a sea of cloth and fang. There was a woman who sang all night, a single note the birds caught in their beaks. There was a miracle or there wasn’t. There was the holy spectacle of belief. The people swore it meant something, the way they shook, the way terror thorned through the trees, but everything continued to exist, flat as a painting, as the open breaking through a wound. There was a sky. The blue-lipped the worms did their work. The people looked at each other and saw ignition, their own terrors crowning them in perfect, piercing arrows of flame.

i'm very honored to have two poems in the latest issue of waxwing, including this one, which feels ... timely. you can visit both poems and the rest of the issue, which i'm lucky to be a part of, here: waxwingmag.org

I remember reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies again and again and again, until I “got” them, until something burst over me like a flood, and I remember, once again, weeping and weeping with a book in my hands.

- Mary Ruefle, "I Remember, I Remember"

In the semidark we take everything off, love standing, inaudible; then we crawl into bed. You sleep with your head balled up in its dreams, I get up and sit in the chair with a warm beer, the lamp off. Looking down on a forested town in a snowfall I feel like a novel — dense and vivid, uncertain of the end — watching the bundled outlines of another woman another man hurrying toward the theater’s blue tubes of light.

You sleep with your head balled up in its dreams.

- C. D. Wright, "Hotels"

Thrilled by the Larry Levis revival, I am.

www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi...

Backwaters in Kerala! A muscular calmness.

Ari Banias. 💙🤌🏼

Carl Phillips: “My First Book Outed Me” While writing my debut collection of poems, I discovered both my queerness and my calling as a poet.

For Carl Phillips, writing poems began as an act of necessity—as a way to stay alive. In TYR today, Phillips looks back at his debut collection. yalereview.org/article/carl...

Periodic reminder that @janezwart.bsky.social is one of the best out there right now. This from @sixthfinch.bsky.social.

WHEN I SAY MY HEART IS FULL, I MEAN IT’S FULL OF GHOSTS On the monitor flashes a creature that’s nothing like a heart. The cardiologist says this is normal. I think there is nothing normal about having inside of your body an animal that jumps and stutters and stops beyond your will, wild even in grayscale on the doctor’s monitor. Outside the elms branch into branches that bud with leaves; the trees collect their secrets in rings inside, truths they’ll tell only after the axe kills them. I think sometimes this is also true of the soul and the body and then I’m miserable, imagining that at the moment of death I’ll reveal every humiliation ringing its truth through my trunk. The cardiologist has no metaphors, just advice: less caffeine. More water. More walking. On the screen my heart is silent, still the floating ghost of a beast running weird in black and white. Then I’m outside; the elm has dropped the bright crescents of its leaves all over my car like a prophecy. None of us get out of this world without losing, without something of the self hitting the asphalt, hitting a high green note to howl out the history of how it felt to vanish under a tire’s tread.

a while back @toddedillard.bsky.social and @toddpetersen.bsky.social suggested i write a poem from one of my posts. the todds are two of my favorite people, so i did, and @baltimorereview.bsky.social was kind enough to take it. plz check out the issue: baltimorereview.org

“These kind of wounds,/They last and they last”: On Taylor Swift, Wounded Reading, and Metaphor content warning: suicide 1. I recently designed an undergraduate English class at my institution called “Rhetoric and Poetics,” named after two of Aristotle’s treatises. Because I love metaphor, which...

poetry.arizona.edu/blog/taylor-...

Blurry Finally in Too Soon Each of Us A water-meadow is not a flood-meadow. A working meadow's not a fallow field. Heartbreak like a bloodhound better off abandoned because untamable. There's a slant of light I used to call Self-Portrait as a Lion, Bringing Down a Stag.

I can’t imagine my life without the poetry of Carl Phillips 💙

@cphillipspoet.bsky.social

The Glade Here, complete with half-swallowed cry of small game rising, stirring the light, is that ease with which a legend goes languorously down on itself, slow-dying; this is the air left behind, thick with…

Here,
where his body lay, gather up all
the broken-stemmed flowers;

photograph the water, that in
the wind repeatedly makes for shore
and misses—

~from "The Glade"
by Carl Phillips
AGNI 33

Armen Davoudian from “The Palace of Forty Pillars” 💙 ✨

Robert Wood Lynn.

THE PERFORMANCE It's not right that she should do this to her boddy as she speaks, but it's the only way we can understand her. We who weren't raised on sand and cherry pits. Whose stepfathers held their tempers. The South is a mean place we forget about. The windows boarded up all over town. She says, dogs chased her down the tar- soaked road like devils. Each dog with three heads, three tails. She says, we might've mocked her story, but never now. First, she strikes nails against her chest like matches. Then, when we think we can't take more from her, she eats her own hands. Who are we now to say that art should not destroy us?

Sarah Rose Nordgren

those final few lines are untouchable

“One Consolidated Gasp:” A Conversation with Rickey Laurentiis - The Rumpus “I remember there was a moment, where I would write a poem, and I would put it immediately on Instagram. And it was just that gesture of extending a hand, and it wasn’t about the poem, it wasn’t for p...

therumpus.net/2025/12/31/o...

Read Like A Poet Vol. 1 Featuring Jack Gilbert's The Forgotten Dialect of The Heart

I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback on this post, so I’m sharing it again: How to Read Poetry like a Poet: open.substack.com/pub/joseoliv...

White page with a chartreuse border. Title at top reads, “A Good Way to Fall in Love is to Turn Off the Headlights and Drive Very Fast Down Dark Roads.” Beneath the title is the author name, “Corey Zeller” Below, a block of prose reads: “In this poem, a poet says he cannot recognize his hands. In this poem, a poet says blossom a lot. Blossom after blossom after blossom. In this poem, Dean Young says we are full of holes. In another poem, Dean Young and Tony Hoagland talk about birds. About Dean Young’s heart surgery. How the new heart learning to beat inside him was like poetry.” A horizontal line separates the text from the footer. At the bottom left, italic text reads, “Poetry / Blackbird v24n1.” At the bottom right is a small blackbird icon.

Black-and-white portrait photograph of Corey Zeller on what appears to be a train, seated next to a window at a table. The image is framed by a chartreuse border.

What a gut punch of a quote. Oof. Thank you, Corey Zeller, for this stunner! Read the full poem at the link below. 🐦‍⬛

blackbird.vcu.edu/a-good-way-t...

Still fascinated by the slant rhyme of shadows in this.

Absolutely brilliant!💙🩵

Pseudo Myth Again, I've confused the horseman for the horse, the artillery of a muscle for a minor hero's sling. What we do in the name of obedience, not thinking wonder has anything to gain over wit. The wheel, at times, will envy the hands that clutch it. The horse, the inoperable reigns. Trust me. I, who have neither head nor heart, whose name is not mine but Girl. What's torn through the center is as good a guide as any.

Sharing the opening poem, “Pseudo Myth” from MORE FLOWERS, out with @triohousepress.org on February 1st, 2026! 🌺

#smallpoemsunday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social

the cover of THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, depicting a red cardinal and blue bird

ooh yes
this is what we call voice
#booksky

One of my new favorite prose poems has entered the chat

Hedgie Choi, from her debut collection Salvage (2025)

vinod kumar shukla ji's passing feels oddly personal, an unnavigable grief. his words are the closest i've come to feeling understood by poetry. grateful i had the fortune of interviewing him earlier this year. rest in peace, vinod ji. this loss is monumental.

blackbird.vcu.edu/interview-wi...

Introducing Banshee 20 poets! We're delighted to be featuring work by
@colmbrennan.bsky.social | @hettycliss.bsky.social | Polina Cosgrave | @satyadash.bsky.social | Stephen de Búrca | @michaeldooley.bsky.social | Malcolm Greenlee Farley | @racheljeffcoat.bsky.social | Finn Dunne Leavy (1/2)