This Is Just To Say

I have turned off
the AI features
that were in
the update

and which
you were probably
hoping
to monetize

Fuck you
they were stupid
so unnecessary
and so annoying

Wet clay vase

Wet clay vase but make it noodly

Wet clay jar

practicing not-poetry

ew

Same for teaching!

The cover of the spring 2026 West Trade Review

American Revelation I bought a gun for my birthday weekend. A Colt .45, cold silver with a knurled grip. It feels just right for thirty one. At the checkout counter the teenager told me about his uncle, who redoes, but pretend, the Civil war. He wanted to show me the uniform, so he Googled "Dixie uniform" and the first hit was a clothing shop for young men's workout wear. My girlfriend and I decided to put off kids for another handful of years at least, say four. We need time to get a better idea of what happens when it doesn't snow anymore, and I'd prefer at least the winter end before I dig up the courage I buried under the back porch in July. It doesn't snow, but it still freezes. They say things get better with age. Our sex life hasn't. Last night I got startled awake from my first good dream in a while, where shapes of whales circled around an ocean vent, dark and numinous. They were all crying-- It was just my girlfriend talking in her sleep. Mechanism, she said. Mechanism.

so happy to have a poem in @westtradereview.bsky.social ! such a beautiful and special issue to me (this is the first poem I ever had accepted for publication)

The cover art for Moon City Review Spring 2026

Playing Pretend The smell of tar became Nevada dust as we crossed the old bridge over Bunkerville ditch. Brown dirt, khaki rock. Hell, even the river was brown. At this point I can't remember what we thought we were doing, but that desert felt like a door to where we could just be brothers without all our history. What is that expression about glass houses, and throwing stones? It goes you shattered me, Jacob, or goes nowhere at all--besides, we hadn't taken aim at each other for years. And we had to stop because you hurt your shoulder chucking one of the rocks too hard. I wish we'd gotten smoother stones and skipped them, or scrambled down to touch the water. That'd make for a better story. Why am I always looking for a better story? Say we hugged it out on that little hill overlooking the Virgin River. Say I flipped a nickel into your likeness on the muffler water, then dove in after the long-drowned boy.

picked this up at AWP and forgot to post about it hehe.. fun to finally have a poem in print!

"A revolutionary is a doomed man with no certainties but love and history." "But our children must grow up with certainties and they will make the revolution." "By example we must show the way so plain that our children can go neither right nor left but straight to freedom." "No," you said. And you left. No moon floods the memory of that night only the rain I remember the cold rain and praying that like the falling water returns to the sky you would return to me again.

Etheridge Knight from Belly Song and Other Poems

When you think about how the media covered Biden’s mental acuity and then see this, you really see how horrible things are and have been and will continue to be.

Someone sent me this.

I'm probably not the first to say this, but a moon launch is such a beautiful and fitting start to National Poetry Month.

I keep seeing "all authors use AI, the real issue is they're being forced to be sneaky about it" headlines.

Full stop No. This is a lie peddled for normalization. It's schoolyard-level pressure tactics "C'mon, all the cool kids are already doing it. We won't tell. It's fine. We're on your side."

Happy birthday!

I just stumbled on this book at AWP and have been loving it ❤️

Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities

I said goddamn

The marches had no shortage of skeptics. In Oxford, Miss,, Cass Rutledge, a first-year law student at the University of Mississippi, walked through the No Kings protest and around the town square on Saturday and questioned why people thought Mr. Trump was acting like a king. "He is, you know, a duly elected president who won the popular vote and the electoral college in a landslide," Mr. Rutledge said. "And so I'm a little bit confused on how he's acting differently than any other president." He pointed to the stalemate in Congress over the SAVE America Act, the Republican-driven bill to tighten voter identification and registration rules, which Democrats have called an attempt to suppress turnout based on false claims of voting fraud. Mr. Rutledge said that Mr. Trump was "going through the process" to try to get the legislation passed.

olemiss.collegerepublicans • Follow The University of Mississippi - Ole Miss Cass Riledge Chairman 59 likes olemiss.collegerepublicans EXEC SPOTLIGHT: Meet Cass Rutledge, Chairman of the Ole Miss College Republicans. He is a senior Public Policy... more

The NYT says today’s #NoKings protests had “no shortage of skeptics,” and then quoted exactly one of those skeptics: The chairman of the Ole Miss College Republicans (as of 2025.)

But of course, the Times doesn’t ID him as such. He’s just a Concerned Youth.

HEARTH It is not the etymology of the word but its provenance we find pleasing: Heart married earth and fire was born.

Reading my way through AWP books
Michael Bazzett

The cited quote and information written in black against a white background. At the top of the full Rumpus logo.

"I’d like to live on the train / with St. Francis / he’d finally allow himself to rest / we’d read holy poems and doze"

From "Meeting St. Francis on the Northeast Regional," one of three new poems by Cammy Thomas.

➡️ buff.ly/N8JmJbD

it's incredible that as long as you do the right amount of bigotry you can just rob the country blind and enough people will not care, even though those same people will be filled with incandescent rage if someone uses food stamps to buy a 12 pack of diet coke

OPEN GESTURE OF AN I I want to give more of my time to others the less I have of it, give it away in a will and testament, give it to the girls' club, give it to the friends of the urban trees. Your life is not your own and never was. It came to you in a box marked fragile. It came from the complaint department like amends on an order you did not place with them. Who gave me this chill life. It came with no card. It came without instruction. It said this end up though I do not trust those markings. I have worn it upside downs. I have washed it without separating and it did not shrink. Take from it what you will. I will --D. A. Powell

Your life is not your own and / never was.

D. A. Powell

VULNERABILITY STUDY your face turning from mine to keep from cumming 8 strawberries in a wet blue bowl baba holding his pants up at the checkpoint a newlywed securing her updo with grenade pins a wall cleared of nails for the ghosts to walk through

Solmaz Sharif's "Vulnerability Study" (as shared by Mag Gabbert elsewhere).

happy (and a bit harrowed) to have this poem out in the world. thanks @anthonyframe.bsky.social

"I am wrong and you are wrong and I’m willing to say it, therefore I am a poet" --Rachel Zucker

Thank you Ben❤️

happy (and a bit harrowed) to have this poem out in the world. thanks @anthonyframe.bsky.social

"I am wrong and you are wrong and I’m willing to say it, therefore I am a poet" --Rachel Zucker

“Girls are laughing
in the dark.
Those are coyotes
you tell me.
Then there are girls,
three, with headlamps,
coming toward us
with light pouring
from their foreheads.”

From “New Year’s Day” by Jacqueline Berger in ISSUE 29!

I still can’t believe this is real. Trump is giving a French company $1 billion in our taxpayer funds to scrap their wind farms.

Do you see, God, how I do not want to have to die to get to come home? Being your child, I want to b so alive that you gasp when I arrive. You acknowledge the grape juice on my lips. You light your Viceroy on the sparks in my hair.

reading Diane Seuss' first book

Spring is upon us . . . There’s one more week to submit your poetry and prose to us for Issue 9! 🌸

garlicpresslit.com/submit

There was ONE ATC in the tower at LGA during last night's crash.

ONE ATC, at LGA!, dealing w ALL air and ground traffic, including a plane filling w a strange smell and no gate to return to.

The Pentagon wants $200B for a vanity war, but our ATC towers are empty.

Budgets are moral documents.

Aubade with Three Geese this morning three geese make themselves at home in the water laked at the edge of a vacant lot down the block as if their relentless journey was always going to bring them right here into my day enough to make me believe momentarily maybe we deserve the beauty we get I know how that sounds I woke with your absence knotted in my body I did not mean to fall asleep before you I would blame the moon a day past full and already disappearing what’s wrong with me nothing we could not fix with stillness together even in temporary water

"nothing we could not fix with stillness"

One of my two poems in the new issue of @theshorepoetry.bsky.social (alongside poems by a ton of great poets!) -- www.theshorepoetry.org/issue-29