iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Also this, because more or less as soon as I could read I figured out that medals on the front were useful for identifying very boring books

Asked how the prize would change her sales, she said: “I’ll get a sticker on the front of my book. Stickers help.”

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Ok I went and looked up why everyone's listening to the wind blow in Iceland today and (as I used to tell my philosophy students that philosophy is the second slowest kind of writing, after poetry, and then I tuned in to the online poetry world and was like OMG what is happening) this is quite funny

She said poetry is “probably more useful than prose right now because it’s faster, and everybody is in a hurry. So basically I think it’s good because it’s brief. Except Homer. Homer’s not brief.”

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The kind of robbery where someone left stuff out at the curb that doesn't have a sign explicitly saying "free stuff" so it's like technically you didn't have permission to take it but

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I love this poem, and its good advice which may or may not be true

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Chances are you have one, or more, of these: "Not the Bread Machine, but the Space it Takes", by Sara Rosenberg rustandmoth.com/work/not-the...

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Looking up that Shaw Patton poem I found *103* @eunoiareview.bsky.social tabs open in my phone browser--what Ian Chung has been doing since 2010 (!!) with Eunoia is just incredible, lightning-fast replies to subs and so much fresh and interesting writing from all over the world

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

...reminded me of this one, "Marriage of the Springs" by Shaw Patton in @eunoiareview.bsky.social in 2023--turns out these two Florida water poems, both of which I like a lot, arrive in different ways at the same image eunoiareview.wordpress.com/2023/12/03/m...

eunoiareview.wordpress.com

Marriage of the Springs

An alligator deathly still in filtered sun rushes down the drag as our boat glides past This spring used to be so clear you could see mastodon bones, but it’s clouded now, green from lawn fer…

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Eek I am now the poet laureate of a line from Michael Lista's poem Noble nook dining room table cloth diapers or whatever it takes to make the second half pirouette the same way as the woods so much for your young people who are normal men and women are not watching a building slowly tilt and swivel

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It would appear that possibly @boxscore.online does not care for my attitude and therefore declines to tell me what I predict

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This get a random postseason bracket by saying predict @boxscore.online thing reminds me of when I "predicted" that the Reds would sweep the A's in the 1990 World Series. Anyway and this year's winner according to me is...

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

God grant me the dad strength etc.

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

For some years I wore a couple of Leafs hats of this style which came with cases of beer, but sports fans drink beer and also "beer hat" would cause confusion with the hats that have two beer holders and a long straw so that's right out obvs

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

IDK I guess it's been coded non-sports-fan, since it's the kind of hat you'd get from J Crew or whatever Also obviously coded non-trucker So I guess it's the baseball cap for men who are left over when you eliminate sports fans and truckers, i.e. dads

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

TIL the kind of baseball cap that sits low and snug on your head, which I would say as compared to a standard baseball cap has been coded female through most of my life, is now called a dad hat

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

It's like once a year you lose your dog and someone gives you a new dog and you're like ah this dog ain't my dog, ain't my dog at all, but then you come around to love the dog anyway because it's the dog you've got and it's a pretty good dog really

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Last day of a cursed Jays season and it's that time of year when it feels weird to know that before long I'll be emotionally invested in hockey

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Ok look I am now the poet laureate of a rainout with a red eye dog tick tock tick tock the other day while I collected and wore her coat the chicken barf on a boat canopy or whatever really distracts us from the lawyer explicitly saying I love the waitress at the same time the Turing test is at 3 am

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

But I mean your next move after Yasiel Puig being the acquisition of DEI-banning powers does seem about right

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Just occurred to me to look at the Toronto Maple Leafs' website to see what became of their Yasiel Puig adventure (you heard me) and this was about the most confusing headline I have ever seen

Website headline reading "MULTI-HOMER GAME FROM DEI BANING POWERS LEAFS TO COMEBACK VICTORY", with a picture of a baseball player about to throw a baseball in the background

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Anyway this was prompted in the first place by thinking while I was out in the canoe why is the cave allegory so dumb It's so dumb because you're dumb, that's why Once you're less dumb you can have something smarter

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Well, it occurs to me that on its face this is a pretty banal Nietzschean jibe--but Plato is trying to trick them into buying a real thing that will do them good, not a sham that will defeat them, which has been the whole problem of the Republic since the initial encounter on the road

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Anaximander: From that which things have their genesis they also have the generation of their decay as they owe. For they must do justice to each other for their injustice by the order of time. A poem of mine that appeared in @arcpoetry.bsky.social in 2024:

Autumn Equinox, Ontario

For a split second the tops of our heads
face the centre of space. We try to stand
our eggs on end. Time cracks us up again.

The barometric pressure bottoms out
and we are changed, our great steaming bodies
of water streaming away from themselves.

Today the atmosphere adheres strictly
to the calendar. A child calculates:
the cosmos carries on necessarily

in accordance with absolute justice.
We've taken its measure precisely.
Each and every thing comes just as it's called.

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Couldn't settle on one song (Dance Me to the End of Love comes to mind first, Take This Waltz kills me but as much for Jennifer Warnes's harmonies, Stories of the Street kills me almost as much, Closing Time I come back to most) so going off the board: I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The cave allegory is Plato's way of tricking power-hungry dudes into loving the life of the mind: what if you can win by simply not being one of the mass of dumb dupes and Knowing Things

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Truly humbled that I am now the poet laureate of a different time zone the air's rusted out of my top priority is ensuring a bear saunters circling back from you soon enough to cause her septic tank to remain on my brain ha ha oh I see the value of your shirt and tie right now because it's idiotic

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

(Hmm ok actually it was never 7-1 last night, only 6-1 and 7-2, but still)

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Feels like cutting a deficit by 3+ runs and losing anyway (yet another one last night!) has been their typical game this year

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

🪠I am now the poet laureate of a plunger between a rock crib bedding and the game on Sunday so I guess the question is how it goes against his chest of drawers and doors open your eyes only one of the adult birds in my head is broken up into two parts for the record I will not give a talk about this

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

🌧️↔️🐐I am now the poet laureate of a novel by a cop who knows what to say that the leopards were in town for the fat burning of fossil fuels such a struggle to keep your eyes only really need Judge and Stanton back just so they're not eating a baseball bat for some reason the rain always misses a Goat

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

#SealeyChallenge 2026, Day 31/31: from Where Sun Meets Shadow by Felicity Sidnell Reid, "Cezanne's Card Players"

Cezanne’s Card Players

Who are these characters,
knees wide under the table?
Strangers with impassive faces,
eyes cast down
intent on the fall of cards.
So minimal is movement
it might be a still life but for
an imminent caress of a roughened
finger as one player weighs the odds.
A boy’s anxiety for his father
keeps him alert on tiptoe.
And leaning against the wall
a detached observer, his pipe unlit,
watches for something to happen.
Cezanne painted his people tense,
pinned—silent in the moment
before some inexorable crisis.

I’m reminded of cottage summers—
those evenings when, backs slumped,
hands cradled a flange of cards above
the scarlet, painted surface of the table.
Fingers drummed, feet thrummed impatient.
Faces convulsed with laughter
confronted others full of anger or despair.
As cards drifted pale and slilppery
into the lamp-lit pool, reddened light
smeared the players’ cheeks, bulging
with the noisy glee of tricoteuses.
Were these games or battles full of fury?
A friendly fight or one risking death?

And was a similar outburst of emotion
prisoned behind that implacable
moment in this painting—
one that the artist sought to capture
five times over….

Cover of Where Sun Meets Shadow by Felicity Sidnell Reid

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

#SealeyChallenge 2026, Day 30/31: from edgeless by rob mclennan (@robmclennan.bsky.social), "estuaries : eleven"

estuaries : eleven

drew, down the wet air

*

this challenge of closure,

of chipmunks , made of cardboard , chatter

*

Gunnison County, Colorado; a name means,
something, the wheat

and meat of bodies ; drainage,

a document of soil,

*

debris, spun; countered , what surface
of inner parts,

she or whom: nearly, or motherless

my own a decade, dead and buried

, drifts in: out of focus,

waterlogged; a so much larger, then

*

a story is never repeated, but
reiterated; the relationship remains;

field optic in the heather; this father of three: my trio of daughters,
each, in turn, taking up
all available space

, on the page

*

motherless, how what use
the river, current , still

the still this makes, is made

my mother , held

mother-in-law , or birth mother,
emerged from offstage

, in and out of focus

*

a story is repeated, but
a river is,

this space of syntax; daredevil language; I wish
to pinpoint this, and this,

the shape of a tree, blurs;
the shape of water , forms a layer

line,

*

a story, is

*

, mammalian

the baby’s breath; a swimming hole,

unforgiving: water, wind; the sun, what skin to peel,

*

I wish to say this one, pure thing;

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

#SealeyChallenge 2026, Day 29/31: from David and Other Poems by Earle Birney, excerpt from the long narrative poem "David"

III

One Sunday on Rampart’s arête a rainsquall caught us,
And passed, and we clung by our blueing fingers and bootnails
An endless hour in the sun, not daring to move
Till the ice had streamed from the slate. And David taught me

How time on a knife-edge can pass with the guessing of fragments
Remembered from poets, the naming of strata beside one,
And matching of stories from schooldays…. We crawled astride
The peak to feast on the marching ranges flagged

By the fading shreds of the shattered stormcloud. Lingering
There it was David who spied to the south, remote,
And unmapped, a sunlit spire on Sawback, an overhang
Crooked like a talon. David named it the Finger.

That day we chanced on the skull and splayed white ribs
Of a mountain goat underneath a cliff, caught tight
On a rock. Around were the silken feathers of kites.
And that was the first I knew that a goat could slip.

Cover of David and Other Poems by Earle Birney

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

So, I am now the poet laureate of a good time to meet with the old testament to our capitalist system specific to the hospital for the record apparently I have been a book or safe list which welp that's the one that looks like a really nice hitter pops up everywhere but I don't know how to use nukes

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

#SealeyChallenge 2026, Day 28/31: from Illicit Sonnets by George Elliott Clarke, "Recollection"

Recollection

To enjoy is Rapture, till parties part,
And a “kind of Heaven” cleaves unto dreams,
Reveries, whose eclipse is Memory,
so that the sun—their past Delight—seems shadow,
And oblique clouds act messengers that tell
What happened and then cast all into doubt,
Transgressing on the facts they’ve just expressed.
All Pleasure is poignant for this reason:
It raptures the body, then vapours free,
So Heaven is too brief, its loss abrupt—
A rupture, and yet it remains a haunt—
An Eden lovers strive to recapture.

Cover of Illicit Sonnets by George Elliott Clarke

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

#SealeyChallenge 2026, Day 27/31: from the above/ground chapbook Socially Awkward Ghost by Amanda Earl

The specifics of abstracts: ravens see beauty
everywhere. Rivers feel everything. Water over
the shoulders of land. Its flow over rocks. Hear
the sound, reader. Sun yourself on the
limestone in the middle of the rushing blue.

Cover of Socially Awkward Ghost by Amanda Earl

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

#SealeyChallenge 2026, Day 26/31: from Civil Elegies and Other Poems by Dennis Lee, Civil Elegy #2

2

Master and Lord, where
are you?
A man moves back and forth
between what must be done to save the world
and what will save his soul,
and neither is real. For many years
I could not speak your name, nor now but
even stilled at times by openings like
joy my whole life
aches, the streets I walk along to work declare
your absence, the headlines
declare it, the nation, and
over and over the harried lives I
watch and live with; holding my breath and
sometimes a thing rings true—
they all give way and declare your real absence.

Master and Lord,
let be. I can say
nothing about you that does not
vanish like tapwater.
I know
the world is not enough; a woman straightens
and turns from the sink and asks her life the
question, why should she
fake it? and after a moment she
shrugs, and returns to the sink. A man’s
adrenalin takes hold, at a meeting he makes
his point, and pushes and sees that
things will happen now … and then in the pause he knows
there are endless things in the world and this is not for real.

Whatever is lovely, whatever deserves
contempt, whatever dies—
over and over, in every thing we meet
we meet that emptiness.

It is homecoming, as men once knew
their lives took place in you.
And we cannot get on, no matter how we
rearrange our lives and we cannot let go for
then there is nothing at all.

Master and Lord, there was a
measure once.
There was a time when men could say
my life, my job, my home
and still feel clean.
The poets spoke of earth and heaven. There were no symbols.

Cover of Civil Elegies and Other Poems by Dennis Lee

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

#SealeyChallenge 2026, Day 25/31: from The Essential Margaret Avison (selected by Robyn Sarah), "Noted, Foundered"

Noted, Foundered

The tap of a carpenter’s hammer
out on the lot.
The neighbour’s tread on the tired stairs,
feeling her way, having brought
pinched loaves, waxpaper farmer’s cheese, two chops,
stiffpaper sugar, wilt-paper greens, paperwet butter, and
the papers, trudging because she is hot.
These two pace the stutter and whir
of sewing-machine thought at its simple seam.

Somewhere a maiden spins in her prison in a tower.
She will endure for a hundred years but
she’s licked from the start.

These are the masks of the midcontinent
where sea once moved, a seabed levelled, dried,
baked, abandoned, ours for this interim-ever.
Cities sprouted, bulged,
jostled for shine at sunset.
Rails and runways gleam and blink.

The carpenter still taps. The neighbour’s aged parent
is dying in the civic hospital.

Cover of The Essential Margaret Avison, selected by Robyn Sarah

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Matthew King @cincinnatusc.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

#SealeyChallenge 2026, Day 24/31: from Bread, Wine and Salt by Alden Nowlan, "Temptation"

Temptation

The boy is
badgering the man
to lower him down the
face of the cliff
to a narrow shelf
about eight feet
below:
“Your hands are strong,
and I’m not afraid.
The ledge is wide enough,
I won’t hurt myself
even if you let go.”

“Don’t be a fool.
You’d break every bone
in your body.
Where in God’s name
do you get such ideas?
It’s time we went home.”

But there is no
conviction in the
man’s voice and
the boy persists;
nagging his wrists,
dragging him nearer.
Their summer shirts
balloon in the wind.

While devils whisper
what god-like sport
it would be
to cling to the
edge of the world
and gamble
one’s only son
against wind
and rocks
and sea.

Cover of Bread, Wine and Salt by Alden Nowlan

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