iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I am not where I should be Michael Ondaatje, from THE DISTANCE OF A SHOUT

Translations of My Postcards

the peacock means order
fighting kangaroos mean madness
an oasis means I have struck water

positioning of the stamp-the despot's head horizontal, or mounted policemen,
mean political danger

the false date means I
am not where I should be

when I speak of the weather
I mean business

a blank postcard says
I am in the wilderness

050

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

you’ve been holding the card this whole time Ben Lerner, “The Rescue” #weirdpoemwednesday

The Rescue

You are afraid to be touched because and that's a reasonable fear, a woman once brushed past me in the aisle or stairs, I've repressed the encounter in amber, she said, and I was destroyed And in the second dream she was holding the dog back from a mourning dove and over us the sky had what I can only describe as exposed beams, and she said if he does get a bird, a squirrel, he doesn't snap the neck or worry it, just stares at me because holds it in the mouth, the tension between what he has been taught and what he feels and the word for that gap is

The vain travail. It's the one poem I've by heart, she said, the way the magician the way the uncle finds the coin in your ear or you've been holding the card this whole time She can make you feel like a missing word, she can smooth back your hair and say there is all this new research about influence, how you need to be influenced by me In the third dream, your daughter brings an offering in her jaws to the bed You should be in analysis or volunteer more You are afraid to be touched because at the shelter. Fourth dream, fifth dream something happened you can't remember

until you recite it, they say "by heart" but it's actually lodged
here, she said, touching my neck above the collar, and here and here Because you are the dog and the dove Lady and hart, the patron and system of patronage, the tension between us could be useful for your work, could hold you back from the mourning
until the poem goes amber in the mouth and speech floweth over the stone, end quote You should write down your dreams then destroy what you wrote, interesting use of "exposed"
—Ben Lerner

072

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

It is very exciting to make a new mistake. Heather Christle, “Shelter in Place” #weirdpoemwednesday

Shelter in Place

A tornado is when the wind
opens the door to your house
and closes it in the lake. A cyclone
is some kind of milkshake I think,
I think with candy inside? I know
someone who made a milkshake
for her babies made of meat.
When you write a book you must not
forget to build a door you can use
to get out or else you will die there.
It is very exciting to make a new mistake.
Every time I turn on the blender I am afraid
the blade will spin out through the glass
and on through my stomach, but still
I keep using it, mostly for soups
and sometimes for smoothies,
a word I would rather not speak.
I'm not brave, but I am hungry,
and the wind has taken my teeth.

0164

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Sometimes when the water runs too long I murmur “sorry, Al Gore” & know in my heart he feels it

020

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

It’s hard, isn’t it, not to look backward? Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from THE NEW ECONOMY #smallpoemsunday

Let My Story Fall Away Behind Me

Let the past fall away
in order to focus
on the edgeworthia's
redolent bloom. The bees
map the air outside
the bee box. Satchels
of pollen heavy on their furry legs.
It's hard, isn't it, not
to look backward?
To let the story
live outside myself.
Have I ever
made a poem
that didn't look
inward? Do I know
a story worth
telling about the earth?

0143

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

How to become star-shaped. Emily Pettit, from GOAT IN THE SNOW #weirdpoemwednesday

THINGS HAPPEN IN THE NIGHT
AND THEN IT IS NOT NIGHT

How it is flickering. How there are deer
and cattle too. How horns might mean something. How to become star-shaped.
How some people can sing. How you
hold a hammer and practice and skill,
it's all related to the bones in the body.
You are my giraffe in this igloo, in this
orange. And the table is orange too.
And the orange is on the edge. And I am
on the edge. And later I will repeat, I am
on the edge. The edge is both the point
at which something is likely to begin
and end. This is the astonishing power
of generosity! How it is infinitely complex.
How it cools outside. How we wonder
is this acceptable? How you hear so often,
Ok ok ok ok ok. I'm ok.

0104

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Alias, alas A.E. Stallings, “Alice, Bewildered” #smallpoemsunday

Deep in the wood where things escape their names,
Her childish arm draped round the fawn's soft neck
(Her diffidence, its skittishness in check,
Merged in the anonymity that tames),
She knits her brow, but nothing now reclaims
The syllables that meant herself. Ah well,
She need not answer to the grown-up beck
And call, the rote-learned lessons, scolds and blames
Of girlhood, sentences to parse and gloss;
She's un-twinned from the likeness in the
glass.
Yet in the dark ellipsis she can tell,
She's certain, that her name begins with "L"-
Liza, Lacie? Alias, alas,
A lass alike alone and at a loss.

092

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Everything is lost in the retelling Linda Gregg, “The Singers Change, the Music Goes On”

THE SINGERS CHANGE, THE MUSIC GOES ON

No one really dies in the myths.
No world is lost in the stories.
Everything is lost in the retelling,
in being wondered at. We grow up
and grow old in our land of grass
and blood moons, birth and goneness.
We live our myth in the recurrence,
pretending we will return another day.
Like the morning coming every morning.
The truth is we come back as a choir.
Otherwise Eurydice would be forever
in the dark. Our singing brings her
back. Our dying keeps her alive.

030

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

The Gen X urge to oh well, whatever, never mind.

1142

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

About time to get a hammer Donika Kelly, from THE RENUNCIATIONS #smallpoemsunday

The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.

The home I've been making inside myself started with a razing, a brush clearing, the thorn and nettle,
the blackberry bush falling under the bush hog.

Then I rested, a cycle fallow. Said winter. Said the ground
is too cold to break, pony. Said I almost set fire
to it all, lit a match, watched it ghost in the wind.

Came the thaw, came the melting snowpack, the flooded river,
new ground water, the well risen. I stood in the mud field
and called it a pasture. Stood with a needle in my mouth

and called it a song. Everything rushed past my small ears: whir in the leaves, whir in the wing and the wood. About time to get a hammer, I thought. About time to get a nail and saw.

0125

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

Let me tell you: some of our countries aren’t where we left them. Jane Zwart, from her luminous collection ODDEST & OLDEST & SADDEST & BEST #smallpoemsunday

Go Back to Your Own Country

Let me tell you about countries: nobody has their own and where we come from moves. Our mothers' wombs aren't where we left them. Continents calve. Jerusalem holds a tray full of glasses that a scrum of men take and put back, take and put back, unworried for the weight she must shift. Let me tell you: some of our countries aren't where we left them. Someone pulls a string and six tumble from Yugoslavia's pocket. Someone halves Sudan like a branch over their knee. Someone crumbles a bailey between Berlins and Germany is one place again. Only Adam had his own country, and he could not go back. A country is land that's learned to disown.

26734

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

dream of honey Ross Gay, “Ode to the Beekeeper” #smallpoemsunday

Ode to the Beekeeper

—for Stephanie Smith

who has taken off her veil
and gloves and whispers to the bees
in their own language, inspecting the comb-thick frames, blowing just so when one or the other alights
on her, if she doesn't study it first—the veins feeding the wings, the deep ochre
shimmy, the singing—just like in the dreams
that brought her here in the first place: dream
of the queen, dream of the brood chamber,
dream of the desiccated world and sifting
with her hands the ash and her hands
ashen when she awoke, dream of honey
in her child's wound, dream of bees
hived in the heart and each wet chamber
gone gold. Which is why, first,
she put on the veil. And which is why,
too, she took it off.

0309

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

often the shadow seems more real than the body “After A Death”, Tomas Tranströmer (tr. from Swedish by Robert Bly)

AFTER A DEATH

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant beside his armor of black dragon scales.

0103

Reposted by Sarah Alice

Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

wanting John Ashbery

The Chateau Hardware

It was always November there. The farms
Were a kind of precinct; a certain control
Had been exercised. The little birds
Used to collect along the fence.
It was the great “as though,” the how the day went,
The excursions of the police
As I pursued my bodily functions, wanting
Neither fire nor water,
Vibrating to the distant pinch
And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.

2186

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

their smoke will fill your mouth Elizabeth Willis, from “The Witch”💀

When a witch desires something that is not hers, she will slip it into her glove.

An overwhelming power compels her to take something from a rich
man's shelf.

I have personally known a nervous young woman
who often walked in
her sleep.

Isn't there something witchlike about a sleepwalker
who wanders
through the house with matches?

The skin of a real witch makes a delicate binding for a book of common prayer.

When all the witches in your town have been set on fire, their smoke
will fill your mouth. It will teach you new words. It will tell you what
you've done.

070

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 26/10/2025

June Jordan, from “Poem at the Midnight of My Life” #smallpoemsunday

I understand the comfortable temptation of the
dead:
I turn my back against the grave
and kiss again the risk of what I have
instead

0113

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

the owlishness of certain people Heather Christle, from PAPER CROWN

Beset by a Disk of Radiating Feathers

Barn owl, crossing the air over the road, dangerous softness of the owl allowing
silent approach, favorite bird of Minerva,
feeding on mice and small birds, fern owl,
horned owl, how can I get one, a lady
or person rambling a long way into
the night, long tufted or mottle-tufted,
neighbor to the one cat, never have seen
one relaxing, not a falcon, an owlet,
the owlishness of certain people,
reputed wisdom of, on a small green
bag of potato chips, snowy owl,
a tamed owl goes hunting and relinquishes
all that he kills, tawny owl, they say
the Owle was a Bakers daughter, well known
by its doleful hoot, what does an ow's egg
look like, where are we going to live

0113

Reposted by Sarah Alice

Ana Marie Cox @anamariecox.com · 07/10/2025

I regret to inform you that Nemik's manifesto is the new Tom Holland “Umbrella.” You have to repost every time. It’s just where we are. #ihavefriendseverywhere youtu.be/-asb8zTiuZ4?...

youtu.be

Andor | Karis Nemik’s Manifesto | Disney+

YouTube video by Star Wars

9271119

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Who am I, I’ve said Natalie Shapero, from STAY DEAD #smallpoemsunday

Really Raining

Every time I've seen the moon, I've thought it was the Earth and I'm somewhere else gazing at it, gauging whether I'll make it back someday. Every time I've seen the sun, I've thought it was the Earth-moon burning and said goodbye. I've always made a point, every time I've seen rain, of announcing IT'S REALLY RAINING, even if it's just a spattering here, a spattering there. Wow, IT'S COMING DOWN. Who am I, I've said, to say what it's like in the spray for somebody else, and by SOMEBODY ELSE I mean of course that bug, smacked over by an eighth inch of water, splayed and aeriform. When you're slight enough to be ended by a single drop, a single drop's a storm.

02510

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

the deep / rosined bow sound of the living Dorianne Laux, “Cello” #smallpoemsunday

CELLO

When a dead tree falls in a forest
it often falls into the arms
of a living tree. The dead,
thus embraced, rasp in wind,
slowly carving a niche
in the living branch, shearing away
the rough outer flesh, revealing
the pinkish, yellowish, feverish
inner bark. For years
the dead tree rubs its fallen body
against the living, building
its dead music, making its raw mark,
wearing the tough bough down
as it moans and bends, the deep
rosined bow sound of the living
shouldering the dead.

15019

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

closing thoughts for James Dobson Wanda Coleman, “Black-Handed Curse”

BLACK-HANDED CURSE

May the sky widen between your eyes and a storm twist across your thoughts.

May the false images you create devour all you give birth to. May the false images you worship obscure love.

May you look in the mirror and see the malignancy.

May you writhe in dishonor. May you writhe hearing the voices of those you have dishonored. May you writhe knowing the whole of the pain you've caused others.

May the limitations you impose on those more gifted than yourself steal the beats of your heart.

May you be kept out of the heaven from which you have kept others.

May no one hear your last words.
May a small rodent eat your last words.

040

Reposted by Sarah Alice

Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

"ICE will run out of dildos before we run out of posterboard" is not a sentence I expected to ever write, but here we are.

61614269

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 10/08/2025

Happy anniversary, Tom & Kristi!💛 Paige Lewis, “When I Tell My Beloved I Miss the Sun” #smallpoemsunday

WHEN I TELL MY BELOVED
I MISS THE SUN,

he knows what I really mean. He paints my name

across the floral bedsheet and ties the bottom corners to my ankles. Then he paints another

for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game, saying, Oh! I'm sorry for stepping on your

shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels of your shopping cart. It's all very polite.

Our shadows get dirty just like anyone's, so we take them to the Laundromat-the one with

the 1996 Olympics-themed pinball machine— and watch our shadows warm

against each other: We bring the shadow game home and (this is my favorite part) when we

stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled my beloved grips his own wrist,

certain it's mine, and kisses it.

2101

Reposted by Sarah Alice

HAD @havehashad.com · 05/08/2025

the ways this Laura Bandy poem builds & culminates & evolves & shifts!! "He was the kind of boy who could be trusted with detailed lists at the grocery store. She was the kind of gel who could swoop your hair into architecturally interesting shapes." www.havehashad.com/tpbx5

havehashad.com

It Takes All Kinds by Laura Bandy

She was the kind of girl you could pay to pet-sit and she would not snoop your drawers. He was the kind of boy who would flirt gently, tipsily, with moms and grandmas at weddings. She was the kind of…

194

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

new ginger bestie: (tap tap tap) Can I get in there? Earth’s haunted. me: What? ginger b: Earth’s haunted.

A svelte ginger outside cat perched on a front porch tapping at the window.

0123

Reposted by Sarah Alice

Jane Zwart (she/her) @janezwart.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

A generalization? Yes. But the evidence is far far far from anecdotal, and so many of us are furious, and so many of us are sad, and so many of us will have less (health care & dignity & money & liveable futures) so that so few of us can have more. Down with the selfish. Up with the shared world.

0162

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

Out of the spigot / streams a thirsty noncompliance Diane Seuss, from “Coda” #smallpoemsunday

Sometimes a bone makes a sound when it breaks.
It sounds just as you'd imagine it would sound.
Other times the bone is as quiet

as a really good burglar breaking and entering.
There used to be a prairie that extended way past

the ending of every story. An expanse of sedges and grasses and wind, which made a sound like a sprinkler when the water has been turned off for the nonpayment of the bill.

The what? The bill. The unpaid water bill. Out of the spigot streams a thirsty noncompliance. An antisong.

0133

Reposted by Sarah Alice

Saeed Jones @theferocity.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

OMG, Jason doesn’t even know he’s an assassin yet. We’re so deep in the lore!!! It’s going to be an incredible day. I’m making chicken nuggets.

52182

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Ross Gay, “American Dreaming”

American Dreaming

Bootstraps like barnacles on boats. Bootstraps
in blankets. Bootstraps in bibles.
Bootstraps on bonnets bubbling up
from the brook's bottom. Bootstraps
make a slave's back bloom.
Bootstraps in back rooms. Bootstraps cinched to shackles
in the womb. Plumes of bootstraps billow
and consume. Bootstrap nooses.
Bootstrap bullets. Bootstrap bombs dropped on buildings
from which blazing bodies blossom.
Bootstraps dangling from coffins
shaped like bassinets in which
ankles fester and weep.

040

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

this is what it’s like to dream, to have access to all these stories and be in one unquestionably. –Alice Notley🖤

My strongest emotion is always, I don't know how I'm going to pay for my time here. Why should that be the human feeling
You are interpreting sensations someone had thousands of years ago A drunken theater of surgeons operating on your eye and other auto parts.

The man says, Knock the visual frame into a new place. Everything's blurry for an
instant but this isn't my eye. Under the sky bombing your old dark
house somewhere, and the pipes installed by pioneers, was I one, this is what it's
like to dream, to have access to all these stories and be in one unquestionably.

At the same time I arrive. They said I transformed you terribly by showing you texts of a radical ecstasy; this is my story. I am becoming your eyes.

-Alice Notley

060

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

Fanny Howe, “Yellow Goblins”

An errant yellow tulip among the shrubbery, displaced and thriving.

Yellow goblins
and a god I can swallow:

Eyes in the evergreens
under ice.

Interior monologue
and some voice.

Weary fears,
the usual trials and

a place to surmise
blessedness.

083

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Michael Ondaatje, from “House on a Red Cliff”

The long, the short, the difficult minutes
of night

where even in darkness
there is no horizon without a tree

just a boat's light in the leaves

Last footstep before formlessness

071

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

The first word wasn’t love, was it? Alina Stefanescu, from her incredible new collection, MY HERESIES #smallpoemsunday

Cosmologies

A partisan of erotic absolutism, reticent megalomaniac even among the divers, at the same time messenger of the halo, Paul Celan.
Paul Celan (in the first prose poem he signed as Paul Celan)

I

We began in cosmic obscenity—
the lascivious bang was the sound
of light's excess opening its mouth.

The first word wasn't love, was it?
It was this once that sat upon a time we can't locate in physics. It was the science of bread being broken and eaten.

I am still terrible at division.
I halved my whimpers when my mother vanished.
It is still easier to subtract than to be

split.

0195

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Sarah, the teacher would report, eschews / the burdens of responsibility. Linda Pastan, “Ethics”

ETHICS

In ethics class so many years ago
our teacher asked this question every fall:
if there were a fire in a museum
which would you save, a Rembrandt painting
or an old woman who hadn't many
years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs
caring little for pictures or old age
we'd opt one year for life, the next for art
and always half-heartedly. Sometimes
the woman borrowed my grandmother's face leaving her usual kitchen to wander
some drafty, half imagined museum.
One year, feeling clever, I replied
why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews
the burdens of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt-old woman,
or nearly so, myself. The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter—the browns of earth, though earth's most radiant elements burn through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond saving by children.

170

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Lizzie Riches, “The Gardener’s Assistant”

A person clothed in cloak + crown composed of green leaves and white flowers while holding a garden spade. Their figure is planted solidly among the flora as they gaze directly at the viewer.

030

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Remember, green’s your color. Gwendolyn Brooks & Ross Gay

TO THE YOUNG WHO WANT TO DIE

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.
Stay here -through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

Sorrow Is Not My Name

BY ROSS GAY

-after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.
There is a time for everything. Look, just this morning a vulture
nodded his red, grizzled head at me, and I looked at him, admiring the sickle of his beak.
Then the wind kicked up, and, after arranging that good suit of feathers he up and took off.
Just like that. And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, some with names so generous as to kick the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon, stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks at the market. Think of that. The long night, the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.
But look; my niece is running through a field calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel and at the end of my block is a basketball court.
I remember. My color's green. I'm spring.

-for Walter Aikens

150

Reposted by Sarah Alice

Dan Chaon @danchaon.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

Le sigh.

0101

Sarah Alice @bandytstamp.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

say you came from the moon Ellen Bryant Voigt, “The Cusp”

The Cusp

So few birds—the ones that winter through
and the geese migrating through the empty fields, fording the cropped, knuckled stalks of corn:
all around us, all that's green's suppressed,
and in the brooding wood, the bare trees,
shorn of leaves or else just shy of leaves,
make a dark estate beneath low clouds
that have the look of stubborn snow.

In a purely scientific exercise—
say you came from the moon, or returned
like Lazarus, blinking from the cave—
you wouldn't know if winter's passed or now beginning.
The bank slopes up, the bank slopes down to the ditch.
Would it help if I said grieving has an end?
Would it matter if I told you this is spring?

061

Reposted by Sarah Alice

Todd Dillard @toddedillard.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Happy National Poetry Month! Here's my first #April3030 prompt (I'll use this hashtag throughout the month) Imagine a factory that, in various strange and surreal ways, manufactures sadness. Now write a poem cataloguing reasons for required maintenance at the sadness factory. Be weird!