iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Callista Buchen @callistabuchen.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Hurray for @blacklawrence.bsky.social Back to School Sale! Get 40% off Look Look Look and other titles! blacklawrencepress.com/books/look-l...

Black Lawrence Press Back to School Sale. Take 40% off our online store with code BACKTOSCHOOL40

Cover of Callista Buchen's Look Look Look. An anatomical cut out of the body with words in pink letters.

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Mary Peelen @ohmary.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

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

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Leslie Adrienne Miller @slipfast.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

A few new poems from yours truly up at Nine Mile Press. www.ninemile.org/spring-2025-...

ninemile.org

Spring 2025 Section 1 | Nine Mile Press

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Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

From “Self-Elegies” by Martha Silano 💔

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.

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Callista Buchen @callistabuchen.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

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

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

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

This springtime poem from the beloved Jenny George 🩵

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Callista Buchen @callistabuchen.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

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...

blacklawrencepress.com

Look Look Look - Black Lawrence Press | Black Lawrence Press

Listen to Callista Buchen read from LOOK LOOK LOOK // Watch the captioned video on the BLP YouTube Channel

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Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

Charles Simic

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.

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Sandra Marchetti @sandrapoetry.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

✨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!

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Alexander Chee @alexanderchee.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

“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

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 &

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Karly Kingsley @karlykingsley.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

We could’ve had Tim 😭

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Todd Dillard @toddedillard.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

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.

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Traci Brimhall @tracibrimhall.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

🐦‍⬛ 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.

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Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Molly Brodak

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.

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Baltimore Review @baltimorereview.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

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

Text of the poem "Tornado" by Callista Buchen in Baltimore Review's fall 2017 issue

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Black Lawrence Press @blacklawrence.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

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...

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Callista Buchen @callistabuchen.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Hurray! Super honored to have two poems in the latest Quarterly West, and extra grateful to the editors for a Pushcart nomination. Poetry forever!

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.

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Christen Noel Kauffman @christenkauffman.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

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 ❤️

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Adam Clay @adamclay.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Send me your poems? www.autocorrectmag.com

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Matt Bell @mdbell79.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

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...

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Callista Buchen @callistabuchen.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Husband has been baking bread this week, so bringing back this love poem for him that first appeared in last fall’s RHINO.

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.

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Ashley C. Ford @smashfizzle.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

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.

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W. Todd Kaneko @toddkaneko.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

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.

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?

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Dr. Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

Since the poets are here now, here’s a poem of mine that just came out, that’s kind of dear to my heart. ❤️

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Callista Buchen @callistabuchen.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

Pretty obsessed with these sleepy cuddle monsters we adopted in September, Wally and Iris. They help us remember we all need more love and more naps.

A white and ginger cat sleeps on his side with all his limbs akimbo.

A buff cat sleeps on her back with her paws curled up.

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🐾 Evelyn Lhea 🐾 @evelynlhea.bsky.social · 25/03/2024

Taking Care - a poem by Callista Buchen. Illustrated by The Oatmeal www.instagram.com/p/C48VteRrZw...

instagram.com

theoatmeal on Instagram:

36K likes, 414 comments - theoatmeal on March 25, 2024:

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Todd Dillard @toddedillard.bsky.social · 27/10/2024

my copies are in and they are GORGEOUS!! thanks to Variant Lit!!! Preorder yours now before they sell out!!! variantlit.com/product/td/

hardcopies of my chapbook Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance

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Diane Seuss @dseuss.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

The Kalamazoo Book Arts Center designed a broadside of the first poem in frank: sonnets, and a handmade book with selections from frank, both with linocut art by Shannon Hardy. Link to the full book in the comments. kalbookarts.org/shop/broadsi...

kalbookarts.org

Seuss by Hardy — Shop - Broadsides — Kalamazoo Book Arts Center

Artist: Shannon Hardy Poet: Diane Seuss

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Amorak Huey @amorak.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Looking for poets, poems, and so on? Here's a place to start. No promises that it includes everyone but I tried to get a lot of y'all in here. Some room to add a few more as people show up. go.bsky.app/5oLR4YJ

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Lindz McLeod - THE MISEDUCATION OF CAROLINE BINGLEY is out now! @lindzmcleod.bsky.social · 08/11/2024

If you're part of the writing community, could you please holla and RT so we can find each other? I want to build up what we once had on Twitter (but better) #writers #writing

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Catherine Weiss @catherineweiss.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

hmm ok here's a recent #poem published in @havehashad.com that i think kinda encapsulates my (usual) poet vibe

at the top of the image is a black and white illustrated pile of skulls that stretches horizontally above text. below reads:

October 17, 2024

THEY FOUND A BEER BOTTLE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE MARIANA TRENCH

Catherine Weiss

I should be lamenting how our garbage beat our explorers,
but all I want is to play spin-the-bottle in the deepest crevice
of the ocean—I'll sip a Smirnoff Ice in the murk
with a slimy little guy whose name I don’t remember.
Let's romanticize being young and under enormous pressure.
You know how it was, when anywhere you went was up.
Whose bottle did they find? Give me a name, an address.
Look, I’m not mad, I promise. I’ll let you kiss me. I have to
remember what it’s like, the road from your lips to the abyss.

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Donna Vorreyer @djvorreyer.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Here's one of mine from HAD: www.havehashad.com/hadposts/man...

On my to-do list, I mistake
Target run for Forget ruin.
I erase everything else.

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Brennan Bestwick @yrfrenbren.bsky.social · 09/11/2024

This Wendell Berry #poem forever

Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.

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Amber Sparks @ambersparks.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Hey guys - did you know that some of most prevalent themes in gothic fiction and films are fear, loss, trauma, oppression, decay, societal collapse, the death of reason? How about writing some gothic fiction with me in December? No reason just saying writingworkshops.com/collections/...

Screenshot of an Electric Literature post promoting a writing seminar on Dec 7th called The Modern Gothic, taught by Amber Sparks

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Erika Meitner @rika99.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Hey writers: it’s post-MFA fellowship application season! If you’re post-MFA check out my long-time crowd-sourced tumblr for info on fellowships, residencies, & other stuff! post-mfa.tumblr.com

post-mfa.tumblr.com

Post-MFA Resources

Fellowships, Residencies, and other resources for people with MFAs in Creative Writing...

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Shō Poetry Journal @shopoetryjournal.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

@dorseycraft.bsky.social’s poem “When We Invented Gunpowder, We Were Trying to Invent the Elixir of Life” is today’s poem in @versedaily.bsky.social! www.versedaily.org/2024/whenwei...

“When We Invented Gunpowder, We Were Trying to Invent the Elixir of Life” by Dorsey Craft

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Dr. Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Be glad if the wind frisking the orchard re-fires in you the need to live —Eugenio Montale, trans. Jeremy Reed #poetry

Be glad if the wind frisking the orchard
re-fires in you the need to live:
here, where a burnt-out circuit
of memories sinks,
was not a garden, but a burial-pit.

The throbbing you hear isn't flight,
but a tremor from the earth's core;
see how this solitary spit of land
flares into a crucible.

A blaze rages on the wall's nearer side.
If you go on, you will come,
perhaps, across the presence who saves.
It's here narratives are composed, and acts deleted by the future.

EUGENIO MONTALE

If there's a loophole in the net,
accept that one blinding exit.
I ask this of you, go, for then my thirst
will lack the sharp corrosiveness of rust...

1990

Translated by Jeremy Reed

From Montale in English, edited Harry Thomas

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Callista Buchen @callistabuchen.bsky.social · 24/08/2024

New poems up today at Quarterly West, one on the etymology of pinking shears, and the other on my son’s red sweater and trying to parenting right.

hile 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

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.

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Amorak Huey @amorak.bsky.social · 10/06/2024

Today would be a good day to send us your poetry manuscript.

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Callista Buchen @callistabuchen.bsky.social · 25/04/2024

This version of “Taking Care” is so special

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Callista Buchen @callistabuchen.bsky.social · 26/03/2024

So much gratitude to The Oatmeal for making my poem “Taking Care” into this gorgeous comic: www.instagram.com/p/C48VteRrZw...

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Callista Buchen @callistabuchen.bsky.social · 31/01/2024

Ah, nothing like daughter getting accused of plagiarism because her paper is too good. Let's not do this, teachers. Be really, really sure, or leave it alone.

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Callista Buchen @callistabuchen.bsky.social · 27/01/2024

Today’s morning walk across the lake with the kids. Saw new water birds, mosaics, and ice fisherman.

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