iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Megan Leonard

Chloe Yelena Miller @chloeyelenamiller.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

In this bonus - and urgent - issue of Poem's Origin Story, @meganleonard.bsky.social shares the origin of her poem “Forest Queen,” published in her new poetry collection, Larkspur Queen (Broadstone Books.)

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Rebecca Hart Olander @rholanderpoet.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

Winter reading, dreaming of spring. ❄️📚♥️🌻 Susan L. Leary‘s MORE FLOWERS, Megan Leonard’s LARKSPUR QUEEN, and Sarah Carey’s BLOODSTREAM. @susanlleary.bsky.social @meganleonard.bsky.social @saycarey1.bsky.social

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Electric Literature @electricliterature.com · 26/06/2025

"I don’t want to believe I get to be part of the conversation—a citizen of the world of writing—only if I have the ability to temporarily exist as a woman without children.” (@meganleonard.bsky.social) buff.ly/pwJScol

electricliterature.com

Being a Writer Shouldn’t Require Me to Exist Without My Children - Electric Literature

“Seven Words About Lemons” by Meg Leonard

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

"Seven Words About Lemons" up at @electricliterature.com today. It's about summer camp, lemonade stands, and the perpetual self-promise to 'write more this summer.' It's sweet. It's sour. I hope you also find it refreshing. Find it here! electricliterature.com/being-a-writ...

electricliterature.com

Being a Writer Shouldn’t Require Me to Exist Without My Children - Electric Literature

“Seven Words About Lemons” by Meg Leonard

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

What I am reading RIGHT NOW (and loving): the new translation by Kathleen Maris Paltrineri of Kristin Berget’s collection, AND WHEN THE LIGHT COMES IT WILL BE SO FANTASTIC. A must-read for my eco-poets! #newpoetry #translation #ecopoets

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

So glad to have this poem in the latest SHADOWPLAY. This is from what I’m currently working on, a collection about family ancestry and what we carry with us in our bodies through the generations. It’s about anger, and witchiness, and also a lot of coastal imagery:

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Sonic Boom Journal @sonicboomjournal.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

We're pleased to present our March 2025 issue, featuring short poems and visual poetry by 34 artists. Happy reading! 🙂 Cover Artist: Jean LeBlanc Download here: sonicboomjournal.wixsite.com/sonicboom/cu...

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Two poems in the latest edition of Sonic Boom -- if you love little poems, definitely read this wonderful issue and give Sonic Boom a follow. I loved every poem in this issue: it's giving jewel box, contemplation, quiet fierceness vibes.

Poem in simple formatting. Text reads: Finding A Forgotten Orange In Winter

A sudden need, to hold the small fruit with your whole hand— so you stop slicing onions
for dinner press your thumbnail into the bright skin.

The sweetness has gone out of it. It tastes clear as though the color is gone
and just laced with ferment—

still you eat every piece leave the peel curled on the drain board,
where you can see it

then finish slicing onions. Brown them. Wash the dishes with pale blue soap.

All evening— long after you’ve put the lamps on— you smell the faintest trace
of grieving.

Poem in simple formatting. Text reads: Prescience

every now and then while we are looking for our house keys
instead we find glass figurines—

checking yesterday’s raincoat pockets slipping fingers past a handbag’s secret zipper we feel a cool, smooth surface:

little ponies roosters cherubic girls carrying buckets— their features rounded simple in blue grey sea-green glass . . .

we line them up as they are found on the kitchen windowsill above the sink
they wait for morning to angle through them—

it’s as if they’ve always been there it’s as if we never understood a lock anyway

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Snowy day reading — absolutely loving this book by Melissa Fite Johnson. Gorgeous!

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 12/03/2024

“It seems you’ve been looking out One window, one moment all your life, At the slant roof and trees, While everything around you evolved, Became something else.” — Cathy Song

ID: gold watercolor paint moves around a charred spot in the painting; ultramarine blue fills the edges in a choppy application. Two lines of childlike, “v” shaped birds emerge from the top and bottom of the page and exit to the right, where the charred spot is free of paint. Three thin lines of bubbles rises from the bottom edge to the top edge on the left hand side.

ID: a piece of watercolor paper that has been burned at its edges creating a vaguely rectangular shape. Ultramarine blue invades a field of gold paint with long tendrils; two lines of v-shaped birds wing out from gaps in the paint, and a very short line of bubbles appears at the farthest left edge of the paper.

ID: watercolor paper that has been burnt at the edges into a vaguely rectangular shape, with gold "u" shapes appearing against a field of ultramarine blue. "V" shaped birds wing out the cup of every gold "U" and two lines of bubbles cut through the center of the page.

ID: stripes of gold paint fill the edges of the paper and a group of flame prints mark the center. Ultramarine blue edges the flame marks and a part of the paper that ripped. Lines of childlike “v” shaped birds fly around the flame mark, and two lines of bubbles rise from the bottom to the top on the left hand side of the page.

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 21/02/2024

Mermaid poems and mermaid paintings today 🧜‍♀️🧜🏾🧜🏼‍♂️ #poetry #watercolor #mermaidsarereal

A long, horizontal watercolor in blues, purples, greens, and golds, with three streams of bubbles emerging on the left and two lines of v-shaped birds coming out of the white spaces on the right. The right top and right side of the paper has been burned.

When We Were Real

Tonight I told every story about the mermaids that met me after a long search after travel through treacherous waters after losing hope then
finally, finally finding me. I was utterly shocked, of course —not even knowing that mermaids were looking for me —I tried to be cool about it and also generous—
they had come such a very long way after all—

I’m told celebrity means everyone knows your name and you do not have to learn anyone else’s name—

This is what I felt when mermaids appeared first in the corners of my eyes a flicker of tail flipping salt water drops against a white-out sun
then later bolder sleek with heft and curve and slip waving to me from granite shoals coruscating in December light—

Now my daughter says the rocks are like fairies, mama.
I slap my hands —hard—

A close up of the earlier painting, focusing on the birds and charred edge.

Mermaids Everywhere

turns out they are smaller than we thought not human-sized at all but minnow-sized which explains why no one ever catches one
they glint right through those trawling nets no problem what lumbering submersible would even notice a school of them flinting past
double-plated windows gazing for giant squid? but once you know what to look for the telltale silhouette you realize they are everywhere:
shoaling through the shadows under a long pier scrimping the surface just ahead of a seagull dive puckering the bay like a brisk December wind—
and elsewhere: on coffee giftbags tucked in stationwagon cupholders clipped to children’s hair tangled in leaf litter blown at the edge of the road
forgotten then re-found in my husband’s trouser pocket. he pulls the mermaid out at a party his face lights with it twirls it between huge dry fingers:
It’s my daughter’s!

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 04/02/2024

Feeling the crinkle and snap of smoke and burn and longing for color in this February cold.

Watercolor painting with gold paint that moves into black paint; paint is diffuse, with pigment moving through water. Black “v” shapes (like children’s birds) emerge from the gold paint and move across the paper. The right hand side of the paper is burned.

Poem text reads: Burning

over and over again you see the same raccoon
                                                the same pileated crorcking                            its pterodactyl crorck
trees mossing up the same superstitions                                 clouds darkening
with all the same delicate fears
like flakes of ash floating up                                      clinging to everything
weighing nothing—

we don’t know what they used to be
we breathe them into our lungs

Watercolor painting in gold and different greens. The greens emerge from the center of the paper like clouds, with the gold encroaching from the edges. Two columns of bubbles cut the paper in unequal thirds. A crooked like of “v” shaped birds emerges from the lower right and moves toward the upper left.

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 30/12/2023

A poem for the new year — a wish for the new year.

Wish

I want you      to clean out the stable       —this will require mucking of course
but what I really want you to do is sweep

it down to bare stone           dulled blue by iron shoes &
weight shifting with contented huffs—

I mean I want you to sweep it down           past hay ground fine under tremendous weight,
I want you to sweep it down past dirt            & when you get to sweeping the last of the hay,
see how the floats of it mix with dust in sun        squaring up to the high, cut window:

there's a dead bat there on the floor        under the last layer of grit        flattened like a petroglyph
almost    unrecognizable    in two dimensions:      a shadow on the dull stone

where one creature crushed another while she dreamed         while the moon shone sharp
through the square window           on a cloudless, good-for-flying night

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 20/11/2023

So grateful to @swwim.bsky.social for giving a home to this little food-poem family-poem, just in time for this week of food-family-(feelings!) holiday. www.swwim.org/swwimeveryda...

Poem, in black text on white background: Family Story VI

The recipes passed down
include stale bread, one egg,
a sip of milk, a little sugar.

A potato cut four ways.

My kids don’t know
there is no money for syrup or meat or milk
again.

They say I am the best mom,
the best mom, the best mom.

I turn crusts into joy,
I sing a bold song with my bad voice and the pan

Continuation of poem from previous picture: is just the right heat. My kids
dance, they silly

all around the table, because I
am the best mom, the best. I show them

how to beat the egg, how to dip
the bread just enough, tell them this
is a family recipe. What kept

my mother, my nana, her people
alive—all this,
all this to pass down.

Screen shot of SWWIM EVERY DAY's November 20th poem, titled "Family Story VI" by yours truly <3

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Reposted by Megan Leonard

Chloe Yelena Miller @chloeyelenamiller.bsky.social · 20/11/2023

Thank you to @porcupinelit.bsky.social for sharing my poem Italian Vocabulary: Di Sotto In Sù www.porcupineliterary.com/post/italian...

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 15/10/2023

Getting ready to read today at The Word Barn in Exeter, NH. Looking forward to being in community — working on these little paintings and readying my poems.

An assortment of small watercolor paintings in gold and color. Images are rough and not very skillful; rabbit, feather, snake with wings, pink lion with mane, and abstract forms.

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Megan Leonard @meganleonard.bsky.social · 13/10/2023

Feeling like a flattened ghost today 👻 so sorting through poems and paintings to try to feel a little more alive.

Watercolor painting with cloud shapes, bubbles, and v-shaped (birds?)

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Reposted by Megan Leonard

Catherine Pierce @catherinepierce.bsky.social · 06/10/2023

New poems in the new Waxwing! Here's one. (Also, whew, this place seems much better than the other place...)

I've Known You All My Life
Catherine Pierce

Animal inside me. No phylum for you,

no class. You are rough fur, satin scales,

plastic, lakewater, steel. Wings and candy wrappers.

Seaweed and hooves. You lunge. Whimper.

Lunge. Poison teeth. Gentle tongue.

Slither into the darkness and find

what you will. Dwell in the damp cave.

Curl up hearthside. Carry the spider. Devour

the bacon. Berries, berries, berries.

Howl. Caw. Crawl. The sun is hot and you leap

into waves. The sun is hot and you pant.

You are lazy for days. You won’t stop running.

Reason can’t rope your long neck. Dear beast.

Dearest beast. You let me get close.

You let me almost touch you.

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