iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Nicholas Yingling

River Heron Review @riverheronreview.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Issue 9.2 is here, along with the River Heron Poetry Prize and interview with Keith S. Wilson. Congratulations to all of the poets whose extraordinary work appears in these issues! www.riverheronreview.com/issue-92

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Mariana Colín @themorbidzoo.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Hey yall I'm on Nebula now! I posted a video on YouTube today, it's pretty good, but there's a better one on Nebula and Patreon about the whole Reckless Ben thing. Follow this link for 50% off a year's subscription or 40% off a lifetime sub! go.nebula.tv/themorbidzoo nebula.tv/videos/themo...

nebula.tv

The Morbid Zoo — Reckless Ben and YouTube Journalism

Welcome to the carnival.

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The American Poetry Review @ampoetryreview.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Congratulations to Claire Wahmanholm, winner of the 2026 Kunitz Prize for her poem "Overwinter."

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Perugia Press @perugiapress.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

On sale till midnight! Happy New Year! 🎉📚🪩

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Perugia Press @perugiapress.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Poets, get your manuscripts ready! Perugia Press’s annual prize opens August 1. Open to women poets, inclusive of all gender-expansive definitions of that term, who have not published more than one full-length collection. Full guidelines & submission info in linktree. Can’t wait to read your work!

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

🚨SALE!🚨I noticed a certain retailer is selling my book for less than $5 and thought I should offer copies for the same price! So, if you've been wanting to read DRESSING THE BEAR, l'd love to send you it! $5 INCLUDES SHIPPING, until I run out! DM me! And thank you in advance! 💙 @triohousepress.org

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Perugia Press @perugiapress.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Please check out our blog (linktree in bio) to read more about the work of Saba Keramati and her book Self-Mythology (U. of Arkansas Press, 2024).🌟 @sabadilla15.bsky.social @uarkpress.bsky.social

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Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP) @clmporg.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

Carolina Hotchandani’s debut collection, “conceived in loss, examines shifts in identity due to Partition, immigration, illness, and birth.” THE BOOK EATERS is published in @perugiapress.bsky.social & featured in our #APAHeritageMonth reading list: perugiapress.org/product/the-...

perugiapress.org

The Book Eaters - Perugia Press

Conceived in loss, The Book Eaters examines shifts in identity due to Partition, immigration, illness, and birth. It is also a study in belonging—to our bodies, memories, stories, ourselves, families…

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Jane Zwart (she/her) @janezwart.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

Feeling grateful (also floored) to turn to a page in Poetry Magazine & find this poem I wrote, with all admiration, after Mary Oliver's "When Death Comes." Thank you, Adrian, Lindsay, Holly, et al.

This poem will be available in an accessible online format at Poetry Magazine's website shortly. You'll also be able to listen to me read it.

Cover of Poetry Magazine's June 2025 issue:
half-carton of eggs, with the letters P O E T R Y painted on them.

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

"When I say land sometimes I mean belief. When I say ocean I mean all the rest unarticulated with the mouth's profane shape" -Amanda Hawkins from WHEN I SAY THE BONES I MEAN THE BONES @wapress.bsky.social

Cover of WHEN I SAY THE BONES I MEAN THE BONES by Amanda Hawkins

Bears Ears National Monument and Other Diminishing Lands

What gods do we grope in common-what land sprawls to the west-

what oceans will swallow
our solid continents? I wanted

the remnants, the salvageable
bones kept clean and away from light.

The paintings-one might stand too close the breath

to carry the unseen,
water droplets decay what would be

preserved. Kept, I thought, was the operative

word suspended-the holy
space set aside.

Who says such preservation is
in contention with logic-

land lies
bare, flat, folded,
stacked, and ripped along a seam. The bones of

the dead are everywhere

believed to be sacred. The land exposed,

but most hidden
by oceans rising, by the land being by nature

a surface. When I say land
sometimes I mean belief. When I say ocean

I mean all the rest

unarticulated with the mouth's
profane shape.

I mean to say how the body moves

is praxis, the paintings
on the stone were roped off to keep

pilgrims from touching-to preserve
what could be lost.

But when I say the bones
I mean the bones.

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

"I was often told to smile by complete strangers as if a six-year-old girl in patched bellbottoms & a Mork & Mindy t-shirt wasn't cheerful enough" - @majda.bsky.social from IN THE HOUSE OF MODERN UPBRINGING FOR GIRLS @wapress.bsky.social

Cover of IN THE HOUSE OF MODERN UPBRINGING FOR GIRLS by Majda Gama

Tala (To the Girl Palm)

When I ate the fruit of the date palm delivered fresh
to me from an oasis in the empty quarter, admired

the gilt-twined bag the fruit lay in, & hesitated to disturb
this wonder of Arab irrigation, fruit bat pollination, & desert patience,

I knew why fathers send their daughters to the West
with kilos of dates: sukkary, khudry, segai, heavily wrapped

& suspicious in luggage; the care in the fruit meant to last us in places
where trees drop all their leaves & appear dead to the eye.

I eyed my gift, portioned myself one to eat on a balcony casting a cool
shadow over sand speckled with blood & feathers from a wild falcon kill,

knew I could have sent that falcon into the sky to feed, knew
that to the East, in the oasis, young girl-palms were sheltering,

growing, while men in white bathed & dressed them,
named them, then let the desert raise them.

Greek Gods, 1978

I was often told to smile by complete strangers
as if a six-year-old girl in patched bellbottoms
& a Mork & Mindy t-shirt wasn't cheerful enough
I had to dwell in their space just while passing them
on the sidewalk walking but in my mind gliding
in new sneakers that promised hermetic levels of flight
I knew Greek mythology could even pronounce the Gods
correctly they had names like my heroes
on Battlestar Galactica which I watched with my twin & parents
in footed pajamas after my father brushed my hair
to a stellar shine I'd open my eyes wide to receive
the feathered hair & sensational teeth of Starbuck my 1st crush
but he didn't like brunettes like me or dark jump-suited Athena
who served on the ship's bridge sending space warriors into battle
with a girl-next-door attitude & contoured cheeks she lost him
over & over again to Cassiopeia of the white-winged disco
dresses who was hopelessly blonde like my mother
who everyone eyed sideways when she walked by them
same for Cassiopeia no one seemed to breathe around her
& Starbuck never really had to choose but they fought over him
nonetheless while he just threw on his leather jacket & blasted
himself into space with a joystick off to fight Cylons in a fleet of jets
called Vipers I hated her (I loved my mother) I still don't trust blonde women
I had the power to dress myself & dressed for myself with Wonder
Woman Underoos underneath as armor for when neighborhood
boys thundered by in a gang of big-wheels catcalling
& that was all I knew of romance for an age.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

A powerful and intimate exploration into the violence of loss within the female experience set against motifs of climate change, disease and generational trauma. I, DIVIDED by @chelsdingman.bsky.social (@lsupress.bsky.social) #NationalPoetryMonth Day 19 ❤️ #poetry #poetrycommunity #ecohumanscape

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Stefanie Kirby @msstefaniekirby.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

This poem by @nyingling.bsky.social in the new Sixth Finch: 🔥🔥🔥 I'll be thinking about that ending for a long time.

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Grateful to @sixthfinch.bsky.social for publishing two of my poems. Check out the whole issue here: sixthfinch.com/mainspring25...

BODY AS SONG, BODY AS BLOOD COUNT

Stress, a virus, a two-mile walk
home through wildfire
smoke when the busses shut down,
someone else’s mortgage
smoldering in my marrow, too much lead
from the mothball fleet or chromium
in the groundwater, until the next administration
raises the acceptable limit, a childhood
beneath the towers and test sirens
of a refinery, a city of employees called
to service, a rain like resin
eating through car paint, the tomatoes—
heirlooms sliced red to the seed—we were advised
not to grow, living along the border
of a class-action lawsuit:
to understand
the numbers inside me,
the hematologist plots my blood on a graph.
She draws a bell curve.
At both ends the distribution levels out
into pure sound, not the instrument but its toll.

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Rebecca Hart Olander @rholanderpoet.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

Gratitude to Nicholas Yingling for this gift of reading, seeing & sharing Uncertain Acrobats (CavanKerry Press, 2021). Appreciate this so much! 🌹📖💞 @nyingling.bsky.social @cavankerrypress.bsky.social

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

"We blend bone meal with soil at the base of rosebushes, tendering roots with the dust of other lives" - @rholanderpoet.bsky.social from UNCERTAIN ACROBATS

Cover of UNCERTAIN ACROBATS by Rebecca Hart Olander. Three dancers or one dancer in three positions, oriented so their bodies are horizontal.

The Cancer Is Back

We blend bone meal with soil at the base of rosebushes,
tendering roots with the dust of other lives.
It is this life I want, we seem to say,
with each swath of dead perennials we clear,
making way for what we assume will come.
But there is nothing to mix into this unspeakable void.
The cells are doing their dire multiplying,
and we already fed them all our best poison.
Can you stand to enter those changing rooms again?
The metallic pull across of the striped curtain,
the flimsy wraparound of a backwards robe?
Couldn't you go on seeking cyber chess domination,
tying up pork loins stuffed with apricots and sage,
wearing the vest you bought in Santa Fe
until the buttons all fall off?
No more pinpoint tattoos!
Your single lung has only just learned to live alone.

Find Alternate Routes

is what the digital road sign flashed
at me as I drove downtown,
as if there is another path through this thicket,
as if we are sleeping beauties
and can be kissed out of our darkness,
as if we can cut away kudzu
and it will stop letting down its insidious hair,
as if we can uproot bittersweet
and it will cease its blood red choking of the lilacs,
as if you will be unchanged,
robust like you were when I was seven
and we crouched together in mirrored pose
mimicking the stance of breaking into a run,
me in my burnt orange corduroy jumpsuit,
hair parted to the side and clasped with a barrette,
my blue Keds beside your running sneakers
still laced tight from the hometown 5K you raced
in your sweaty, sun-worn baseball cap,
your skin browned from being in the world,
early fall 1979, and every beautiful muscle showed
in your legs and your flashing smile,
oh, damn this route you are racing now,
all those other games gone,
your detour paved with brittle prognosis,
coasting swells nothing like the adrenaline
that used to course through,
making you feel every inch a man.

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𝕄𝕒𝕣𝕜 𝔸𝕟𝕥𝕠𝕟𝕪 𝕆𝕨𝕖𝕟 @markantonyowen.com · 11/04/2025

The Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Literary Prize returns – and this time, it's for fiction. Run by @ballerinibookpress.bsky.social with the support of Kari's family and her partner Bill Abney, the award this year will be judged by @rfredekenter.bsky.social. Find out more here ... bit.ly/3Raw18J

bit.ly

The Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Literary Prize 2025

Submission open on May 5 2025

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

"No lungs, no heart, no breath- irresistible now, what might you see? A bird's dying shudder or lovers knotted in a plotline of release? You're an example now of nothing, a fountain of nowhere-" -Susan Rich from BLUE ATLAS @redhenpress.bsky.social

Cover of BLUE ATLAS by Susan Rich. Four potted plants ascending stairs. The pots are a deep blue against the turquoise stairs.

This Could Happen

If you kept walking, you would eventually step outside of yourself.
You would leave the bones of your body,

the bloodlines to all that you loved.

You would be free of breasts, liberated from the eyes of body admirers-

to travel this earth like a star lily or skunk flower

with the forbearance of golden bees. If you kept walking out of the self

you could begin again as seawater, as spindrift.

Don't worry, you'd say,
you're a virgin non-body, you're a witness

to ten thousand new worlds.

No lungs, no heart, no breath-
irresistible now, what might you see?

A bird's dying shudder or

lovers knotted in a plotline of release?
You're an example now

of nothing, a fountain of nowhere-

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

"Now we are splayed out like dummies in the mud, like shot soldiers, like angels telling lies about the stars." -Joe Wilkins from PASTORAL, 1994 @riverriverbooks.bsky.social

Cover of Joe Wilkins' PASTORAL, 1994. A barbed wire fence at dusk or dawn, everything but the horizon still dark.

FABLE

Coyotes sleep nose to tail in dank caves. A lonesome
mountain lion lids the slats of her eyes. In the wind
yucca flowers dune and drift. I know the names of things
here, the very rise where my father's bones lie,
not so far from my grandfather's, and save a sad handful
of stories that's as far as we go. Like a city street
that ends in a high fence, and it is unclear what has been
fenced in, or out, and even here, in this nameless city,
you'll find coyotes snouting and slavering after grease
and trash, the odd housecat, and it's their recolonizing racket
that wakes the child, who rises, whose small hands tremble
against cold window glass, and the child's father, a man
whose daily work is to take work away from other men, leads
the child back to bed, tucks him in, blesses him, blesses him.

PASTORAL, 1992

My little brother & I are walking the irrigation dike.
The night moonless, overcast, no farmlights
for miles-this is true darkness,
the kind you might call ink or river bottom,
storm or stone, under the covers, up a cow's ass, closed
casket. My brother breathes wetly
behind me. Mud sucks at our sneakers. It is straight up & down
July 4 midnight. My fingers stink of gunpowder
& potato salad. When I close my eyes
firecrackers leap & pop, & all I want is more-
more spark & trace, whistle & bang-
but what I've got is a field flooded all to hell
& back, surely now a useless crop of foxtail, & my little brother
half-asleep on his feet & when I stop
running smack into me. Now we are splayed out like dummies
in the mud, like shot soldiers, like angels telling lies about the stars.

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Shō Poetry Journal @shopoetryjournal.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Today is the last day to get your work in! Subs close tonight at midnight (PT). shopoetryjournal.submittable.com/submit/31379...

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Really stoked to have a new poem in the spring issue of @theshorepoetry.bsky.social! I have long admired this journal, & I’m grateful to the editors for including me—& alongside so many poets I love! Happy World Poetry Day, too, friends! 💙 Read the issue here: www.theshorepoetry.org/issue-25

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Dorianne Laux 💙 from WHAT WE CARRY

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

"Give the termites your worry / about affording the rent. They too / are saying, eat / the rich." - @stevenleyva.bsky.social from THE OPPOSITE OF CRUELTY

The cover of THE OPPOSITE OF CRUELTY by Steven Leyva.

Seasonal Depression

Give the termites your worry / about affording the rent. They too / are saying, eat / the rich. Two kids up / the block slash a neighbor's tires / while the elderly / couple are away at a wedding. Why / do I even bother to tell / anyone who's listening / that everyone involved was white / except me? Give the newborn / mosquitos their banquet of blood and your worry / about diabetes and rotted teeth. Who can say / what insectivore / is waiting/ to eat the things that eat / your worry. Joy: the long-tongued sloth / or joy: the pitcher / plant. Given the insistence on phoenix your tendons return to / given the moles that arrive / on your neck / year after / year from your grandmother / given the fact / that every elegy fails / to reach its true audience / why do I bother / to slash and slash and slash / white from this page?

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Workshops4Gaza @workshops4gaza.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

have you signed up yet?

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

"How he unhooked the curtains and wrapped me, naked, in what light they still held" - @meganmerchant.bsky.social from HORTENSIA, IN WINTER

Cover of HORTENSIA, IN WINTER by Megan Merchant.

SUBJECTS TO CONSIDER FOR BOTH PAINTING & WRITING

Film on my teeth after eating a hard-boiled egg. Why anyone would call blood crimson. Chopping wood on a day you can see your breath. The clicking sound that Mahjong tiles make. The speed at which they are placed. A windchime strung with bones. The way winter light feels most earnest in the morning. His chin, as it pressed against my shoulder blade. The muscles of grief that cramp without warning. Why men are allowed to age-the absence of a societal tantrum. The Farmer's Almanac that everyone in town is mumbling about. Radishes in a white bowl. Glue, hardened, on the window that looks like frost. Scratches on old records that are a kind of music. Gray hairs in the sink. How he unhooked the curtains and wrapped me, naked, in what light they still held.

PORTRAITURE: NUDE

We are taught to yearn for erasure. Red stockings drying over the porcelain tub. Strands of hair in the sink. The spot of shade between thighs. Pigeons on the landing, iridescent until the light rearranges, shifts to the apartment next-door, unpacks. If you were to paint want back into my skin, it would be with an old brush, streaks of morning blue stained into the bristles. The wood handle smooth, the air in the room tasting most like Spanish olives spooned directly from the can.

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

"What you taste with abandon even God cannot take from you" -Chris Abani from SMOKING THE BIBLE @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

Cover of SMOKING THE BIBLE by Chris Abani.

WHITE EGRET

"The whole earth is filled with the love of God."
-KWAME DAWES

A stream in a forest and a boy fishing,
heart aflame, head hush, tasting the world-
lick and pant. The Holy Scripture
is animal not book.
I should know, I have smoked
the soul of God, psalm burning
between fingers on an African afternoon.
And how is it that death can open up
an alleluia from the core of a man?
How easily the profound fritters away in words.
And the simple wisdom of my brother:
What you taste with abandon
even God cannot take from you.
All my life, men with blackened insides
have fought to keep
the flutter of a white egret in my chest
from bursting into flight, into glory.

EJIMA

after David St. John

That way the Yoruba carve the likeness
of a child when its twin dies. Carve a doll
for the soul still journeying
across a vale of light and shade.
Dress it in a tunic of leather, cloth,
beads, and cowries. A new birth, a new child,
carried by the mother and fed
with love and breast milk.
Suckled next to the living-flesh to wood,
blood to grain, spirit to body.
When the soul knows
better how to come and go,
when the spirit is warmed from anger,
slowly, over time, it sits by itself on the shrine,
gathers cobwebs and dust and a gentle neglect.
Until then, my brother, I carry your doll,
a photograph of the child you were,
close to my heart. And when you call
in the dark I answer, calm your soul,
sing it into light. In time,
you will join the album on my ancestral shrine
and gather cobwebs and the dust
from the dust, grow sticky
and fat from palm oil and gin,
wear your gentle neglect with a hush.

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Jared Beloff @readinstead.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

I have 6 copies of this book left & 5 copies of Poets of Queens 2. If you DM me your proof of donation to any of these, I will send you a signed copy. California Fire Foundation L.A. Fire Department Foundation Pasadena Humane Society American Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles World Central Kitchen

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Emily PhD 🎓 @ejwillingham.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

If anyone says “DEI” or “Newsom” or whatever abt the LA fires, point to the massive, unprecedented climate disasters happening globally outside the range of either of these factors and say, “anti-climate, pro-fossil-fuel policies” over and over until they pass out from the burden of that truth

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Ilya Kaminsky @ilyakaminsky.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

In case this is of use for friends in Los Angeles area:

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

"In his bath my son looks half- drowned, lying so still, his hair a scarf of weed, his eyes closed, and only the water breathing." -Catherine Barnett from INTO PERFECT SPHERES SUCH HOLES ARE PIERCED @alicejamesbooks.bsky.social

Cover of INTO PERFECT SPHERES SUCH HOLES ARE PIERCED by Catherine Barnett.

Ritual

In his bath my son looks half-
drowned,
lying so still,

his hair a scarf of weed,
his eyes closed,
and only the water breathing.

He practices
in his porcelain bed
his resting,

rehearsing
until the water takes cold
and he shivers a little against it.

Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced

We unstrung necklaces into two glass bowls
and passed them round to the mourners.
The beads were onyx, agate, quartz, all manner

of stone. Everyone was to take two
and at the end of the service
put one back in my sister's hands.

What could she do but collect
the round weights all night?
She has not restrung them,

not wanting to be finished yet with death.

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Claire Wahmanholm @cwahmanholm.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

Another one from Wilder, written just after we elected Trump the first time, when so many ppl were saying no no, it won't be that bad, it's all bluster, it's just talk. And here we are in the witch's house again/still. You can read the full poem online here! www.indolentbooks.com/what-rough-b...

indolentbooks.com

What Rough Beast | Poem for April 20, 2017

Claire Wahmanholm The Witch A rich talker, thought the children from their bone cages. They had been watching the witch for several days and didn’t believe a word she said. No one ate children anym…

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

"if not to sleep, then to obey the dark" - Jenny George from AFTER IMAGE @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

Eclipse

All the birds are ill. They flood the elms,
driven to roost by a noontime dusk.
The trees are full of eyes. One body blots out
another body. Isn't that how it works?
She died. It floats on my vision like a burn:
Hands folded like a bride. Dark cave
of the mouth, open-as if a great sound
were being drawn in. We were very tired.
We covered her in flowers as she cooled.
The crescent of her foot hung off the bed.
Now the birds are quelled,
disturbed and quiet. A strange hour of silk descends. They settle in the trees--
if not to sleep, then to obey the dark.

Vivarium

Some people collect dirt from significant places.
Or spoonfuls of cloudy ocean inside jars.
Like amateur naturalists, they keep
these treasures permanently on a shelf.
Of course an amateur is simply a person
who loves, who brings love to bear
on a particular subject.
Returning from one trip I failed to bring back
a jar of anything. I stood outside my house
where white stitches of snow were dissolving
into the ground beneath the evergreens.
An unset moon floated over the trees.
If I stand very still, I do no further harm.
I am a tiny theater of non-harming. My breath
watches raptly. Sees how everything is still alive.

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Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

Joe Wenderoth

The Only Fortunate Thing

You have an idea of yourself.
It is a kind of building.

This building stands on the sound
of your heart-beat,
the imaginary width
of rhythm.

All night
it stands there.
On a sound,
an imaginary width.

It is fortunate, really—
really, the only fortunate thing—
that there is no one in the building.

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Jenny Molberg @jennymolberg.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Hey all! Pleiades Magazine is now on Bluesky—give us a follow? 🙏🏼✨🦭@pleiadesmag.bsky.social

pleiadesmag.bsky.social

Pleiades: Literature in Context (@pleiadesmag.bsky.social)

Literary Magazine

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

"where you awoke last night to find the fabric of space wrinkled / like the bridge above your nose" - @rubenq.bsky.social from BRUTAL COMPANION

Cover of BRUTAL COMPANION by Ruben Quesada. A pixelated face lit green and half in shadow.

ON PRESENCE

For René Magritte

Will you see the faces you once heard about
from your neighbor's eight-year-old son days before

he died, as you look out toward the sky?Those apple-faced
angels watching through the drawn curtains of the window

where the rain has streaked your view into tobacco-
colored sunlight smoking the bedroom; onto the bed

where you awoke last night to find the fabric of space wrinkled
like the bridge above your nose; remember the disproportionate

weight of dark matter heavy on your bottom lip the balm of
your body against my mouth

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Shane McCrae @akasomeguy.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Jenny George is one of my favorite poets. Her books are fantastic, and this poem is fantastic. poems.com/poem/eurydice/

poems.com

"Eurydice" by Jenny George

from "After Image" published by Copper Canyon

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Burgi Zenhaeusern @burgi.bsky.social · 20/09/2024

"We were simply" [...] "before you died." I love this poem & the many ways you can read it & make it last. Dressing the Bear by @susanlleary.bsky.social ✨️💙✨️ #poetry

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Derrick Austin @paradiselaust.bsky.social · 14/08/2024

Sealey Challenge: Bestiary by Donika Kelly

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 07/08/2024

"box trucks and networks can be so lonesome, so owned. & I am alone tonight, trying to remember that we don't want what we think we want." -Rosie Stockton from PERMANENT VOLTA

Cover of PERMANENT VOLTA by Rosie Stockton

Eunuch of Industry

I've got some human requirements
hornet, injury, toothbrush.

technology
invented my need and I do

I need against schedules
lodging my hunger

for you
and cement sound.

what if we kissed
in the Amazon locker?

crude oil massage, your hand lotion
on my choke points

your most fresh sacrifice
boxed like Blue Apron

there's no time to eat
rotting in a stoop's sunlight.

box trucks and networks
can be so lonesome, so owned.

& I am alone tonight,
trying to remember that

we don't want
what we think we want.

O Plato my Plato
I'm calling off our sessions

I'm blocking your image
& of all your shadows

what about the shadow
their chains cast?

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Reposted by Nicholas Yingling

Burgi Zenhaeusern @burgi.bsky.social · 06/08/2024

It's always a good time to listen to @luaz.bsky.social's wisdom, and on @ofpoetrypodcast.bsky.social to boot! Don't miss!

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Nicholas Yingling @nyingling.bsky.social · 04/08/2024

"I am the body next to but unlike yours. You already know me. You already know what I'm made of." -Rachel Zucker from MUSEUM OF ACCIDENTS

Don't Say Anything Beautiful Kiss Me

Anyway,
if my lips were rose petals they'd taste too bitter.
If my cheeks were apples they'd crawl with apple worms.
If my eyes were stars they'd be dead by the time you saw them.
If I moved you like the moon I'd disappear once a month.
If my teeth were Chiclets you'd want to chew on them and spit them out.
If my hands were birds you couldn't hold them; they'd peck you bloody.
Is my skin alabaster? Then it's cold and hard and one day someone will skin me, make me into a cold hard box tinged with pink or yellow, to hold unguents, then how will you love me?
If my vagina is a cool, dark forest you'll certainly be lost, you have no sense of direction.
If my vagina is a cave—watch out! It's prone to seismic shifts and avalanche.
If my vagina is a river of honey: orange, lavender, fine herbs, hazelnut, all too sweet.
If my ears are shells I can't hear you, only the ocean anyway.
And if my voice is music, it is unintelligible.
Don't say anything...

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Reposted by Nicholas Yingling

Derrick Austin @paradiselaust.bsky.social · 03/08/2024

Sealey Challenge: Dear Memphis by Rachel Edelman

What I Know of God by Rachel
Edelman

Benjamin sat in the dip between God's shoulders,
rocking side to side when God swung God's arms.
God's arms must be so tired. So strong. O God, I cling to the back of your ankle where your skin wrestles itself into folds. I've made it hard to reach me. Benjamin held your neck between his legs, his dick at the base of your skull. Grown as we are, we are still your children; we still stand tense when your foot disappears in the sand. When Benjamin entered the narrow place, how did you turn from his hunger? The sight of your face—it would kill us.

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Reposted by Nicholas Yingling

C.T. Salazar @ctsalazar.bsky.social · 28/07/2024

Once again thinking about these perfect two stanzas from Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Jerusalem”

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Reposted by Nicholas Yingling

Trio House Press @triohousepress.org · 20/07/2024

Win a book for your Sealey Challenge TBR pile from @triohousepress.bsky.social — just post a photo of one of our titles and tag us before 11:59 pm on July 31! One entry per tagged post. 📚💜💛

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