iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Today I'm saddened to hear of the loss of Jools Topp. The Topp Twins have been lifelong icons of community spirit and a better, brighter, more inclusive New Zealand. I wrote this poem a few years ago for an event honoring our queer ancestors, later published with Cordite. Photos via RNZ

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Very happy to see this mushroom-foraging poem in the Missouri Review! A love (hate) letter to sultry summers in Ann Arbor, Michigan...

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Busting out my one Kiwi Christmas poem for our southern summer solstice..... Barbecues and beers and sunburn and pōhutukawa in full flower oh my

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Surprisingly nice day for a stream-wade

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

New form I've been playing with in the new issue of @anmlymag.bsky.social Repetitions anchored in erasures, a sort of void ghazal... And this one a love letter to the little wood I went to all the time in Ann Arbor, all orbweaver webs & vernal pools & trillium ephemerals anmly.org/ap41/rebecca...

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

Lil contrapuntal out with Cordite poetry journal last month, featuring Lactarius mushrooms (this one is edible!) & the horrors of fanmade Pokémon fusions (Milfing is Miltank + Koffing, on which I had to make an explanatory slideshow when I read this for our MFA program's sponsor, see attached)

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

Last thing I'll make in the States for a while! Oil painting on wood, finished as a Leo's birthday gift before I head home to Aotearoa 🦁

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Michigan winters are for the lovers... and the Pokedex remains an excellent source of negs for your fellow 90s kids...... thanks Hera & @thespinoff.bsky.social for having me ❄️ 🐎 🔥 thespinoff.co.nz/pop-culture/...

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

ConConclave this conclave that why is nobody talking about the announcement of the jack-in-the-pulpit in the woods

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

We're open for submissions at Sweet Mammalian! Full guidelines here: www.sweetmammalian.com/submissions

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Nawlins bound from frigid Michigan! See you soon for the New Orleans Poetry Festival - I'll be roundtabling with some fave poets about the works of Tina Darragh and new printing of her Mutant Solidarities from Blue Bag Press ⚠️☢️⚠️

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

New fire from Anthony DiCarlo on @havehashad.com ❤️‍🔥🔔🐚 www.havehashad.com/hadposts/2-p...

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

Poet prom face brought to you by the $4 Shrek Puss in Boots eyeshadow palette from TJ Maxx

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Received feedback on my poems again 😔

Screenshot from Severance of Mr Milkshake's performance review, the first complaint being "uses too many big words"

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Giddy to have a bitter little ditty in the latest issue of the New Delta Review 🕯️ 🔥 🌬️ ndrmag.org

POEM TO BE READ IN A BACKLESS HALTERNECK DRESS WITH A LINGERING ODOR OF BURNT HAIR

Rebecca Hawkes

Idiot!!!!! That is not your wife (the moon) it’s a plastic bag
stuck in a tree. It’s a biblically accurate pickup truck
overtaking at impossible speed. Gun to your head

how many kinds of cloud could you name right now?
A hawk banqueting on roadkill flares its wings
over the possum carcass, not meaning to flee

but to defend its catch from the oncoming headlights.
It’s the third time at this bar tonight I’ve held my hair
against the candle at our table til it catches light. As I blow

dark that sizzling wisp, the flame goes with it. Dumb ghosts
drifting mutely from the wick. I keep saying I don’t even need
a face. Let the hard robot of your body hate what it hates.

"Immortality" sounds lousy to me. What doesn’t kill you
presumably makes you wish it would. Today to be healthy I ate
a purple wildberry fresh from the vine, assuming it would be a grape.

It wasn’t that. I spat for my life. Bitter biter better go down
swallowing. Gargle all the moonshine. Somebody is always
trying to lead me to water. I’m just here for the free drinks.

Volume 15.1, winter 25 Rebecca Hawkes

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

It's good to be drawing again! Missing my home-birds so here's a kōtare and a tūī 🕊️🔥🌀

A monochrome illustration of a kōtare and a tūī in flight against a backdrop of dark swirls and white flames, with parrot tulips peeking over the edges of the frame

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

Walking on water (Huron River frozen over)

Man in red and black checked Swanndri jacket walking on a frozen river, with a pier to the right in the distance

A view downstream of footprints on the frozen river heading under a bridge

View upstream showing an island now accessible by walking on the ice

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Lovely to see this poem in Palette is still making its way in the world, especially through the @literaryhub.bsky.social annual list!!!!! Thanks Karyna for the kind words 🕊️ 💖🌱 lithub.com/49-contempor... www.palettepoetry.com/2024/09/18/p...

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

*Charlie xcx everything is romantic voice* eBay jacket with a broken zip

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

There's a lot to love in this issue - I was especially captured by new work from young poet Sophie Rae-Jordan 🐠 "an emotion is a fish-eye lens in free-hand I draw the horizon it drapes off the side of the paper" More from Sophie and others online at: turbinekapohau.org.nz

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Two poems in the 2024 issue of Turbine | Kapohau!! One of these arose from a barista mishearing my name as "Ruby", which happens a lot in America with my kiwi vowels, and was not as startling as the party where I introduced myself as Becca to someone who did a double take and said "BIGOT??"

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

Chuffed to hear Frank Skinner discuss my book on his poetry podcast this week! What a gift to be read so thoughtfully - he delivers a beautiful close read of these two poems from Meat Lovers, on rural daughterhood and being unpopular at pony club 🐎🪐🐄 open.spotify.com/episode/5fCI...

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

A fellow mushroom forager spotted in Ann Arbor

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

I had the most splendid time attending Dan's workshop at Kenyon this June - among the ghost pipes, campus fawns, rainbow light and silken cirrus of those wide Ohio skies

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Airini Beautrais is a river-forward author in Aotearoa, with many poems to and for the Whanganui like these two of protest and of reverence Flow: overland.org.au/previous-iss... Pākaitore: www.bestnewzealandpoems.org.nz/past-issues/...

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

It's been a troubled year for poems but here's Phyllodes Reveries, from a few months ago 🕊️🍈🌱 www.palettepoetry.com/2024/09/18/p...

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Among many moving words on poetry & ecology from @orchidtierney.bsky.social, Emma Neale, & Sam Sampson, there's a lyric-ish riff from me on my nature poetics. It starts with that one Stafford deer poem but careens a few other places... Thanks to John G for hosting 🌿 johngeraets.com/ecology-of-p...

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 25/10/2024

To go outside in Ann Arbor right now is to go *challengers Zendaya scream* AUUUGHHHH COME ON

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 24/10/2024

Got the lumpectomy yesterday! Nothing like a lil cancer scare to see out my twenties but I'm happy to be healing up well, waiting to be fully cleared on final biopsies of the excised lesions, and living for the next couple of weeks in a binder that looks like a Glassons crop top from last summer 🌸

Post-op selfie with pink floral binder to keep pressure on the area after a lumpectomy.

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 18/10/2024

Very happy to have this sultry scarlet poem featured by @glasspoetry.bsky.social this week 🌹👠💋 www.glass-poetry.com/journal/2024...

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 12/01/2024

Waiting for the bus after overnight snow

Lamp in the snow, dark woods in the background

A long driveway with tyre tracks carving a soft S in the snow

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 19/12/2023

Another cute lil snow flurry in Ann Arbor

Red berries and... You guessed it.... Snow

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 26/10/2023

Woodland kreachers of the fall 🍂 my Antipodean ass is slowly becoming accustomed to routine squirrel sightings but I was gobsmacked by this stick insect....... Love to commune with a giant phasmid🍃

Phasmid ascending into the golden crown of a tree

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 26/10/2023

King Midas has beeeeeeen out bushwalking

Squirrel foraging among the gilded litter

Gold being the operative colour of the woodland

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 26/10/2023

Pure pleasure to take a deep huff of Hannah Mettner's new book 'Saga' out now with @thwupbooks.bsky.social. Don't mind me getting obsessive about perfumes in the review - promise I talk about the actual poems too: www.newsroom.co.nz/book-of-the-...

READINGROOM
Book of the Week: Love and sex by a bi icon poet
By Rebecca Hawkes
Oct 19 2023
9 min read

The best book of poetry of 2023 (so far) is electric with sex and reads like a MILF manifesto

Lately I’ve been thinking about fragrance. Where I write from now, in Michigan, pumpkin spice is the seasonal scent which cometh before the fall. Kerbside lavender smells wrong here – less the familiar grandma-sweetness of colonial garden varietals in the Aro Valley, more a stringently rangy herb that reminds me of my own strangeness in these streets. Before I flew my girlfriend gave me the last of her own perfume. It’s an indie Of Body concoction wrung from lavender and animals that almost chokes me with yearning on each spritz, lingering carnal as skin hunger on my wrists. And I’ve mostly been reading Fragrantica cologne reviews while avoiding the poetry that lured me to this place so far from love.

Olfactory sommeliers have much to say about what happens on the dry-down; what’s left after a perfume’s initial flourish, how it ripens or decays on the skin. It’s a bit like poetry. The test is what sticks with you ages after the first dizzy hit of sound or sentiment.

In Wellington writer Hannah Mettner’s new poetry collection Saga, the signature aromas are thunderhead ozone, prosecco fizz, and citrus with a knife-blade twist; settling to organic base notes of dank cave mildew, powdery library stacks and rich, metallic blood. I’ve now spent good time with Saga, let it cure, and complexities continue to develop. Matters of motherhood and inheritance are central concerns – and while contemporary capitalist polycrisis is an inescapable undertone, love poems that promise gratuitous sex are enjoyably messy as bedsheets.

One of the most affecting poems to me was a love letter to Chauvet Cave, the site of some of the world's best preserved Paleolithic art. The poem culminates in a visit to a precise replica of the fragile archaeological site – its exact dimensions and temperature, artworks and humidity. Mettner’s at her very best in moments like this – revealing a cave-dark heart below the witticisms and tender attention that reaches back through human sagas to crave what’s original, primal and unforgiving in us.

Give me true art, real desire, genuine darkness, or nothing. Even if the replicated cavern with its faux-dankness ultimately didn’t trigger the hairs at the narrator’s nape, this book reeks of realness. I’d give it five stars on Fragrantica.

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 17/10/2023

Ratmode in my nest of papers for term break, but reckoning with the critical question of which teeth to mould my Halloween fangs to.........

Greathy haired brunette with plathtic fangth on canine teeth

Greathy haired brunette with plathtic fangth on inthithorth

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Merciless troll lord @gorsebloom.bsky.social · 08/10/2023

Some autumn feelings: brisk air but still bright sun, cycling through crunchy drifts of fallen leaves and black walnuts, realising the pool is truly closed for the year but unleashing childlike wonder for spooky season, buying myself family sized trick or treat packs of Heath toffees at CVS 🍂