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Cover of Callista Buchen's Look Look Look. An anatomical cut out of the body with words in pink letters.
Hurray for @blacklawrence.bsky.social Back to School Sale! Get 40% off Look Look Look and other titles! blacklawrencepress.com/books/look-l...
I have a new website!! and I'd love to know what you think :
marypeelen.com
Many thanks to the very excellent digital designer/editor/poet @kristindsanders.bsky.social
Not sure where this is going, though, yeah, pretty fucking sure. Pretty not pretty as my daughter would say, kinda shapeless and no funeral please, no roses or potted begonias. Please donate to trolling for fish instead of netting, to Cornell Lab of Ornithology. When I stack breaths, I'm reminded it ceases— that's the Hurricane Debby of this thing: weakening diaphragmatic storms. Inhalations de-escalating. My nineteen-year-old self didn't imagine this. I was learning bird calls, hermit thrush and song sparrow. Keeping a list, but also wandering the forest counting the decades forward, a human lite like alpine snow that seems it will never melt.
From “Self-Elegies” by Martha Silano 💔
So happy to have two poems up at The Normal School, a dream publication! www.thenormalschool.com/blog/2025/4/... #poems #thenormalschool
Coherence CALLISTA BUCHEN Two months after the wasp sting, the bruise is hard and small, the size of a button on a men's dress shirt. A faint ring shadows the bruise, and she touches the center. Its hardness grows into her arm, toward the bone, and she feels the burn under her fingers. He says he doesn't see anything. She thinks her forearm will become a rock if she is not careful. Her body feels further away already. Some morning when she leaves the house, the rock will break off from her body when she knocks against the doorjamb, forgetting the hardness that pulls against her shoulder. It will fall in many pieces, get lost in the gravel. She won't notice for a long time. Only when she reaches for the bruise, after they have set out their clothes for the next day, after he tells her she is pretty, after he quiets and breathes with his whole body, will she imagine the loss.
Book cover; orange cracked ground with the text The Bloody Planet poems by Callista Buchen
Find my chapbook THE BLOODY PLANET on sale this month at @blacklawrence.bsky.social (just $5!) along with amazing books from so many admirable writers. blacklawrencepress.com/books/the-bl...
#poetry
This springtime poem from the beloved Jenny George 🩵
So @blacklawrence.bsky.social is having a sale this month—find Look Look Look and SO many amazing titles (plus they’ll make a donation to the National Women’s Law Center with each book)! blacklawrencepress.com/books/look-l...
Make us see what you see in your head, Emperor. I see you soldiers under everyone’s feet. I see a house of cards about to fall. I see a parrot in a cage admiring himself in a mirror. I see a tall ladder meant to reach the moon / teeming w demons and men.
Charles Simic
✨COVER REVEAL✨for my third full-length collection of poems, DIORAMA, forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press this April! Pre-order links in the comments! Do get a copy!
Ordnance At the museum I learn I am as tall as some bombs (5'7"). The bombs in question are dumb bombs, which means they do not question gravity. They just land where they land, bury what they can. Placed in rows they look something like soldiers. Dumb soldiers. The placard explains how all bombs used to be dumb, how the term was coined retroactively by whoever made them smart, taught them about lasers, thermo-dynamics, critical theory, all the things a contemporary bomb must know to stay competitive in a growing field. War was simpler when my dad lived here. It was called Saigon then & the bombs were so dumb they didn't even know it. All they had to do was their jobs. Christ. This place has no damn AC. The casualties are colorized, the tourists are foreigner than me, & Lennon serenades us on a loop, asking us every three & a half minutes to imagine no possessions. My phone dings. Take museum with salt, texts Ba. It's propaganda. Fish sauce, I reply. I send him photos: me standing in front of a nearly forgotten apartment, an elementary school, a wildlife sanctuary. I allow him to imagine me happy. I tell him on Tuesday I fed mangoes to a ten-year-old elephant. I do not tell him it was recovering from a land mine blast. I do not tell him his friend groped me last night at the bar, & I definitely do not tell him I am a communist. The world is a list of things I keep from my father. Before I leave, I run my hands over the shell of another sleeping bomb. But I'm not the only one, sings John. We're dumb as hell. Full of hurt. Excerpted from "At the End of the World There Is a Pond: Poems." Copyright © 2025 by Steven Duong. Published by W.W, Norton &
“At the museum I learn I am as tall as some bombs.” — Steven Duong, “Ordnance,” At The End Of The World There Is A Pond
Tim Walz
We could’ve had Tim 😭
my book came out when the lockdowns started. I barely promoted it. Then when the protests began I continued to stay silent. I felt small and insignificant and unworthy. I’ve since heard several people say they needed my poems. Please. Don’t keep your art from those who need it. Especially not now.
🐦⬛ Surviving another day with this stunner from Danusha Lameris’s BLADE BY BLADE. I loved that this book had the darkest hours and the most gorgeous hopes.
So happy for her!
IN THE MORNING, BEFORE ANYTHING BAD HAPPENS The sky is open all the way. Workers upright on the line like spokes. I know there is a river somewhere, lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that, whose irrepressible birds can’t believe their luck this morning and every morning. I let them riot in my mind a few minutes more before the news comes.
Molly Brodak
Text of the poem "Tornado" by Callista Buchen in Baltimore Review's fall 2017 issue
Wednesday Prompt Plus:
Need a spark? Here’s a prompt, and here’s the link to “Tornado”: baltimorereview.org/fall_2017/co...
And here’s the plus: link to Brecht de Poortere’s huge database for fiction/CNF writers: www.brechtdepoortere.com/rankings
Praise for Look Look Look by Callista Buchen
"This is a book about mothering like no book about mothering that has ever been mothered forth." —Diane Seuss
Learn more about Look Look Look - blacklawrencepress.com/books/look-l...
QUARTERLY WEST 8754 73 •112 Callista Buchen Pinking Shears about names / saw-toothed and biting / how language / is like a thread / or how language / is either what / cuts or the cut / itself / I am / cutting the linen / edges frayed / but less so / metallic yawn / like how / to pink / once meant / to pierce or stab / and later to decorate / but also the flower Dianthus / which is a family / of carnations / scalloped edges / and dots of / half-closed / eyes / and pink / has been / a boat / a fish / something / small something / excellent / with / these scissors / at least there is / less lost / a small eye / the fish / the stabbing / of the body / and the word / the new thing / about to be / made
While improperly darning a hole in my son's new red sweater I start with You Tube videos because I want to get this right, to learn competence as love. I'm learning to fix this scar, starting a quarter inch away from the hole, repair anchored in what hasn't yet unraveled, guiding the needle through loops of knit before I turn and weave vertically, tiny checkboard whole. He's always loved red, one of the first colors infants can see, one of the first colors used in art. Past red, we can't see color, though we feel them, infrared and hot, something like yearning. My first mistake involves the knot. No, my first mistake is my choice of needle, which is wrong. Then the knot. I'm using thread instead
of yarn, but I go on anyway. He loves red like armor, his bureau drawers full of fire, what he chooses over and over. I close the video. There are times I have been brave, but I don't know how to pretend to know what is best. I prick my finger, drop of blood (if it was there at all) invisible, in this patch I create to cover the gap. I'm not fixing a scar after all. No, I'm making the scar itself, mapping that which has been lost, acknowledging what is left. He just wants the sweater back. Later, were sitting at the table and he runs his thumb over and over the patch, touching it without thinking, a good luck charm, so sure I did it right.
Hurray! Super honored to have two poems in the latest Quarterly West, and extra grateful to the editors for a Pushcart nomination. Poetry forever!
It’s pub day for my first poetry collection!
To celebrate, I’m sharing the final blurb from the incomparable Tiana Clark.
You can order a copy from @ghostpeachpress.bsky.social
ghostpeachpress.com/purchase/ or soon I’ll have signed copies available ❤️
Send me your poems?
www.autocorrectmag.com
Creative writers: come work with us at ASU! We're currently running a search for an Assistant Teaching Professor to teach undergrad CW in-person and online, and to oversee online curriculum development as their service component. More info here: english.asu.edu/about/employ...
Callista Buchen Bread In our home, my beloved does The baking. I have no patience For proving, no touch for Kneading, for knowing when Enough is enough. But when he Smells like bread, my body Becomes an oven. Sometimes There is flour in his hair. Some Times I remember his long-ago job at the bakery, out on early Morning delivery, how he’d be home by lunch in a cloud of that Warmth, which never quite washed Out, always a little bit sweet.
Baking is believing things usually Work out. I am not good at feeling Loved, I tell my beloved, who Shapes the dough, who reaches For me like I am an answer Or a recipe, like he wants me Like I want him. No, he says, when I take small bites, when I try to make The bread last a little longer. No, He says, eat. We’ll make more.
Husband has been baking bread this week, so bringing back this love poem for him that first appeared in last fall’s RHINO.
Would love to be added!
Am old and weird, if there is space!
I’m going to keep it real and hope I don’t get accused of overstating the issue; children’s liberation is the key to the future you want. The active, and often dismissed, oppression of children is near the root of what ails us as a nation.
I’m here!
DEAD STARS by Ada Limón Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing. Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us. Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels so mute it’s almost in another year. I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying. We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder. It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn some new constellations. And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus, Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx. But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising— to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward what’s larger within us, toward how we were born. Look, we are not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder? What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No. No, to the rising tides. Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land? What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain for the safety of others, for earth, if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified, if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds, rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
In the classroom for the first time since the election. “Dead Stars” by Ada Limón seemed like a good way to start today’s discussion of The Carrying. I’m grateful for this poem, for so many poems.
Since the poets are here now, here’s a poem of mine that just came out, that’s kind of dear to my heart. ❤️
