iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

This one. I was 19 and I still can’t forget it and would want to see it again. “Paper Boat” from the series Drawing-Wire, by Vik Muniz (1995) Boston Museum of Fine Arts

A photograph of a paper boat made of wire moving in water

020

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Back on my Tranströmer kick (tr. by Bly, of course) for this #smallpoemsunday. Also one from me.

Evening-Morning
The moon-mast has rotted, and the sail crinkled.
A seagull sails drunkenly over the sea.
The thick cube of dock looks charred. Bushes crouch down in
the dark.
On the doorstep. The sunrise pushes again and again through the gray stone-gates of the ocean, and the sun sparkles near the earth. Half-suffocated summer gods grope in the sea mist.

Something Completely Natural

All that color,
all that opening,
just because it's time.

Face turned up,
thinking it may rain,
but first, the whole sun.

0125

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

One from Aracelis Girmay and one from me for this #smallpoemsunday.

To Waste My Hands
Three years ago, I stood on the dock near my father's house
while the small shark suffocated & was killed.
He was like an angel culled up from the purple sea.
& the air smashed into him like an anvil

& his muscles sank desperately into the ribs. Terrible

terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible
to watch him that way. More terrible to waste my hands, just standing.

PRACTICE
Some mornings
I wake with a mouth full of light -
not the kind that warms,
the kind that burns
through paper, through skin,
the kind that means go, go now.
People learn to sleep
through mornings like that.
Roll over. Pull the dark back up.
Call it rest. Call it wisdom.
I am already standing
in the doorway, wondering
what happens when I step
outside, into the wind.

083

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

A little something for #smallpoemsunday. One from me, one from Amanda Berenguer (tr. Gillian Brassil and Alex Verdolini).

HONDO IRIS FARM IS CLOSED, I GUESS
Highway 70, west of Roswell opens like a green eye in the desert, filled with wet color. Agave
wider than a child's wingspan, stabbing toward the sky,
iris stalks reaching for the sun, which is everywhere, purple and yellow and pink, soft, the scent of water
lingering as a thousand blooms breathe. I was going to tell you:
there is a place where the desert just gives sometimes,
digs the word oasis up from its roots and hands it to you
dripping, still alive.

(the porcupine)

sometimes /
there is a closure in the space I occupy / and here / I / suffocate /

the light / dark / caught /
it bristles / a porcupine / furious /
and won't let in the smooth /
elegant / oxygen /

051

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

One from me and one from Jane Hirshfield for this first #smallpoemsunday of May.

In Bed
A tulip bulb doesn't know winter,
no, her little heart knows time. And so,
she waits, balled up
in cold patience, rehearsing the red, remembering what it it is to open
under the sun and stars and rain, remembering the world keeps ending
and ending, and she will grow anyway, keep taking her pills, keep dreaming,
and then, one morning, after breakfast, start stretching toward the light. Her hands getting dirty. She will not care. Look,
the whole sky will bloom. And her.

RAIN THINKING

When it is finally quiet—
the loud refrigerator
still at the same time the heat is—
I hear the sound
and awaken.
Like a cat cleaning herself in the night,
or a dog opening
and closing his mouth
the way they do at times
when thinking,
as if tasting something new.

062

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Made good on my effort to try this one. Went an unexpected direction. Apparently my life is a rupture. Happy with this as my poem to #PoetryMonth today, though.

IT'S TODAY, AGAIN
Everything is connected, but nothing is working.
The rhododendrons, for instance, unexpected purple, sending you back to bull thistles
in another state where even April can sweat through its shirt, the low places filled with water, frogs, turtles. Dragonflies, iridescent, clinging to each other in the reeds like they know
something about brevity and passion, how wings reflect sun in the sunlight, absence
in the shadows. You are learning a woman the way April learns a field, how she wants to be kissed, captured, pinned and preserved, photographed, sepia toned. The desert
before it knows what it's about to do, a flat patience,
inside a two week long explosion that comes every year, before the brightness of summer and the yellow of Spanish broom reminding you of forsythia and the geese that went overhead this morning, one bad wheel on a shopping cart, already somewhere else|
by the time you look up. The road stretches between the softball tournament and home and the place by the river where you stopped
for Blue Moon ice cream, dish soap blue, dish soap taste that also carries bubblegum and joy without knowing what's ahead. You ask Am I doing it right? The rhododendrons blush and open, like you, like the woman, in complete silence. You photograph them anyway. The cruise control holds and then releases. You step on the gas, you see, it doesn't matter. You're still going somewhere.

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Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 12/04/2026

We all need good dreams sometimes. Here’s one for #smallpoemsunday.

HOW AN EMPTY DREAM IS FILLED

The last centimeter of air between us forgets which of us is warm.

Your breath unlocks something inside me
I forgot was designed to open.

Your mouth a small explosion I lean into.
Soft. Then less soft.

My hands cup the small of your back
like I am holding something that could spill.

072

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

In case you need a reminder that beautiful and wonderful things still exist right now.

Photo of some Cape Marguerite flowers. Dark purple and yellow centers with white petals that have purple tips.

141

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Today for #PoetryMonth, "The Portable Shrine" from Melissa Kwasny. This entire collection (The Cloud Path, 2024) is filled with spirit-stirring work. Extraordinary variety. Extraordinary cohesiveness. A true work of wonder.

THE PORTABLE SHRINE

Gather the bones and pile them near the aspen, still in leaf.
A clavicle, a dozen fetlocks, a few big as your knee, a thousand-pound animal reduced to what you can easily carry.
Some days there will be beer cans, underwear from a fling.
There must be forgiveness, a clearing, a space swept of debris.
Taking and giving, a crucial part of the portable shrine.
Focus. You must pause to do so, which means
you come alone, the bitter breakfast tea still on your tongue.
In your toolkit: a three-foot plume of purple fireweed gone to smoke and seed. A book of matches, perhaps a bell.
The bell can be a cowbell, wind chimes, or the tap of two stones, soft as the bald path you've worn between your house and a loved one's. Add incense, candles, or ashes from a stove. Yes, ashes, no matter whose, will build one.
Remember the old world is site-specific. Place a rock in a shallow stream. See how many more you can balance atop it. Hold your breath like a robin's egg, as if you were a nest, entrusted with all things smooth, blue, and oval.
The last night you were at your mother's house, unable to sleep, you took photos of her kitchen cabinets, her pillbox, her matching towels, printed with flowers and leaves.
There are shrines we leave behind us, un-portable shrines.
Set a flag blowing in the wind, bow to the moon in the west, where the herbalists rub its skin with oil of pine.
But know there are places you can approach only in the mind.

010

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 02/04/2026

Today for #PoetryMonth, one from Elizabeth Willis. Meteoric Flowers shifted what I understood a poem could be, what words could do, and what connectedness meant. “The Earth’s Nucleus” is from that volume.

THE EARTH'S NUCLEUS
This dirtball invites me to think "with" not "for" it. I display a desperation spoken straight from my feet. Should I hear you cry, I wouldn't think before I dropped my glove to find you; that's how dirt thinks. Why the ear, the shape of longing, why the endless whorl you came from? Seeing air doesn't mean it sees you back.
The latest molecule might travel far enough to hide you underground for good. Even while we stare the season down, worlds pour like symptoms of its greedy polished joy.

020

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

The very first book of poetry I bought myself was the Penguin edition of Early Poems by Robert Frost. I loved so many of them. His work has undeniably influenced me over the years. His pastoral themes, humanity, wonder, and sense of connection make me return and return. Now this for #PoetryMonth.

THE TELEPHONE
"When I was just as far as I could walk From here to-day, There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say—
You spoke from that flower on the window sill—
Do you remember what it was you said?"

"First tell me what it was you thought you heard."

"Having found the flower and driven a bee away, I leaned my head, And holding by the stalk,
I listened and I thought I caught the word— What was it? Did you call me by my name?
Or did you say—
Someone said 'Come'-I heard it as I bowed."

"I may have thought as much, but not aloud."

"Well, so I came."

031

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

It's April! Welcome to Poetry Month! Here's a list of 30 prompts to maybe get your keyboard or pen jumpstarted. I've tried to put together a variety. Happy poem-ing for these next 30 days! #NationalPoetryMonth

APRIL PROMPTS

1. write a poem that begins with an animal watching you
2. something you kept that doesn't belong to you
3. driving through a town you used to know in the dark
4. write a poem addressed to a body of water
5. that time the light changed
6. what she meant when she said "nice"
7. write a poem about a word you stopped using when someone left
8. the etiquette of vanishing
9. women who name their cars
10. "Does this go faster?"
11. the hazards of mercy
12. sometimes I feel human
13. what are you superstitious about? and yes, you are.
14. remember a specific moment. write about the hour or two preceding that event, not the event itself.
15. pinkie promises
16. mourn a particular sunrise. what was lost in the daylight?
17. love poem from inside a parked car
18. write a poem to your worst enemy
19. the contents of a drawer you refuse to clean out
20. aftertaste
21. where does your confidence come from?
22. something gentle that learned to be feral
23. write a poem about the strangest place you've cried. focus on the location more than the reason.
24. "Do one thing that scares you every day until you die."
25. two truths about the same summer
26. "There are wrecking balls inside us."
27. write a poem that ends with a door
28. "better" as a myth
29. a response poem to another poem you've written this month, or earlier
30. peace offering

0103

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

Trans Day of Visibility is weird today. But I’m here. I came out quietly a few years ago. Started HRT days before Trump was inaugurated for the second term. I’m not scared, & refuse to be afraid when there’s so much love if you look for it/open yourself to it. Support your trans friends & creators!

Selfie of Selby, a white woman with blue eyes, glasses, and dirty blonde hair. She is a couple months into transition, wearing an athletic shirt, a plaid over shirt, and a denim baseball cap. She is trying to look casual and cool despite massive insecurity that is clear in her face.

Selby, a white woman with blue eyes, glasses, and dirty blonde hair. She is wearing a grey green cardigan with a black shirt and a couple of necklaces. She is still insecure but likes this picture of herself.

Selby, a white woman with blue eyes, glasses, and dirty blonde hair. She’s smiling a little, wearing a blue top, the lace strap of her bra showing. She is not bothered.

Selby, a white woman with blue eyes, pink glasses, and dirty blonde hair. She is wearing an olive green shirt and floral blazer, full makeup, and a smile.

070

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

One from Elizabeth Bishop and one from me on this late March #smallpoemsunday.

Sonnet

Caught-the bubble
in the spirit-level, a
creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed—-the broken
thermometer's mercury
running away;
and the rainbow-bird
from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!

1979

YOU BUY A COPY OF THE WAVES

Six people dissolve
into each other. You read this
and think of me. I am becoming
the wet of an unfamiliar word
on your tongue, a different sacrament
entirely.

You want me
the way the shore wants
to be the thing that stops the water.
It doesn't. It just gets stirred
by the surf, and
nothing is concluded.

0113

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

I need more book covers like this in my life.

Book cover. Clean and minimal design. Typography based design for The Colossus and Other Poems by Sylvia Plath. The cover is cream with alternating rust and navy lettering for the word COLOSSUS, with the letters stretched down to cover the entire page, and the subtitle and author information at the bottom in that creamy text.

071

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

For World Poetry Day, on this late morning in early Spring, one of mine about flowers and trees and time...

Spring Comes Back
But Never the Same Way Twice

Once: pussy willows, which are not
cats, are not willows but something
soft refusing to be one thing.
I touched them. They let me.

Once: crocuses pushed through snow,
purple and furious. Beautiful and done
apologizing. The lake ice broke
into new geometries.

Once: mistook birdsong for a car alarm,
mistook a car alarm for my own pulse.
I still don’t understand why
the rhythm of life is want or fear.

Once: the the redbuds took their time,
the swell of each bud kept secret for weeks,
then one morning, the rain arrived
sideways, and there was pink everywhere.

Once: forsythia, sudden and obscene,
yellow-throated and shrieking
from every hillside,
the color of hope.

Each iteration, proof
nostalgia is just losing track of how
you are changed
by what you thought you knew.

The cherry blossoms are different this year.
The tree does not remember
last year's flowers,
so it makes new mouths to speak with.

263

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

The world is a mess. And here I am, settling. Calming down. Scott’s voice and words from the past carrying forward. Seeing it all. The darkness. The glow within. And he might be gone, but the momentum of the music isn’t. And that’s important.

Music station setup. Victrola record player next to a stack of LPs and CDs. Standing cover is Frightened Rabbit, Painting of a Panic Attack.

010

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

I’ve had a busy couple of weeks. One from me and one from Tess Gallagher for this #smallpoemsunday.

Translation

I was learning a new language,
but it exploded, and now

my mouth doesn't know what to do
with all these phonemes
without the rules.

They are screaming,
but all I can do is cry.

Blue Grapes

Eating blue grapes
near the window
and looking out
at the snow-covered valley.
For a moment, the deep world
gazing back. Then a blue jay
scatters snow from a bough.
No world, no meeting. Only
tremors, sweetness
on the tongue.

0123

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Thornton Wilder on language and curiosity.

I use the word curiosity in the French
sense of a tireless awareness of things. (It is too late to arrest the deterioration of our greatest English words. We live in an age where pity and charity have taken on the colour of condescen-sion; where humility seems to mean an acknowledgment of failure; where simplicity is foolishness and curiosity is interference. To-day hope, and faith itself, implies a deliberate self-deception.)

022

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Yesterday’s birthday gifts included a real jewelry box, flowers, and apparently winning tickets to a concert. Also, for the first time in as long as I can remember, no big bad personal drama.

A vase full of happy flowers in pinks and blues, and a green succulent in a black pot.

020

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

The sky is wet and grey, but the moss and lichen on the trees is very green and makes me very happy.

Phone photograph of trees and greenery against a grey sky. The winter-bare branches are dripping with bright green moss and lichen. Darker pine trees in the background provide contrast.

0110

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

Your last saved photo of a celebrity is your therapist. Sure.

Photograph of Rosalía wearing a flowing, extravagant red gown on a sunny beach. Her hair is blowing in the wind as she faces the sun.

020

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

One from Molly Brodak and one from me on this #smallpoemsunday.

HOW TO NOT BE A PERFECTIONIST

People are vivid
and small
and don't live
very long-

THINGS I WANT IN A RELATIONSHIP

witness

Look. The berries are local.
Were expensive. I eat them all
in one sitting.

053

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Some Tranströmer (tr. by Robert Bly) for this #twopagesplustuesday.

Schubertiana
I.
Outside New York, a high place where with one glance you take in the houses where eight million human beings live.
The giant city over there is a long flimmery drift, a spiral galaxy
seen from the side.
Inside the galaxy, coffee cups are being pushed across the desk, department-store windows beg, a whirl of shoes that leave no trace behind.
Fire escapes climbing up, elevator doors that silently close, behind
triple-locked doors a steady swell of voices.
Slumped-over bodies doze in subway cars, catacombs in motion.
I know also-statistics to the side-that at this moment in some room down there Schubert is being played, and for that person the notes are more real than all the rest.
II.
The immense treeless plains of the human brain have gotten folded and refolded till they are the size of a fist.
The swallow in April returns to its last year's nest under the eaves in precisely the right barn in precisely the right township.
She flies from the Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over two continents, navigates toward precisely this one disappearing dot in the landmass.
And the man who gathers up the signals from a whole lifetime into a few rather ordinary chords for five string musicians the one who got a river to flow through the eye of a needle is a plump young man from Vienna, his friends called him "The
Mushroom," who slept with his glasses on
and every morning punctually stood at his high writing table.
When he did that the wonderful centipedes started to move on
the page.

Ill.
The five instruments play. I go home through warm woods where
the earth is springy under my feet,
curl up like someone still unborn, sleep, roll on so weightlessly into the future, suddenly understand that plants are thinking.
IV.
How much we have to take on trust every minute we live in order
not to drop through the earth!
Take on trust the snow masses clinging to rocksides over the town.
Take on trust the unspoken promises, and the smile of agreement, trust that the telegram does not concern us, and that the sudden ax blow from inside is not coming.
Trust the axles we ride on down the thruway among the swarm of
steel bees magnified three hundred times.
But none of that stuff is really worth the trust we have.
The five string instruments say that we can take something else on
trust, and they walk with us a bit on the road.
As when the lightbulb goes out on the stair, and the hand follows—trusting it—the blind banister rail that finds its way in the dark.
V.
We crowd up onto the piano stool and play four-handed in F minor, two drivers for the same carriage, it looks a little ridiculous.
It looks as if the hands are moving weights made of sound back and forth, as if we were moving lead weights
in an attempt to alter the big scale's frightening balance: happiness and suffering weigh exactly the same.
Annie said, "This music is so heroic," and she is right.

But those who glance enviously at men of action, people who despise themselves inside for not being murderers,
do not find themselves in this music.
And the people who buy and sell others, and who believe that everyone can be bought, don't find themselves here.
Not their music. The long melody line that remains itself among all its variations, sometimes shiny and gentle, sometimes rough and powerful, the snail's trace and steel wire.
The stubborn humming sound that this instant is with us upward into the depths.

032

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

Please sign off if you need to. Traumatizing yourself is not helpful to you or your community. But, if you’re going to be here watching the horrors unfold, here is your timeline cleanse.

Landscape with a grassy cliff as the ocean stretches toward mountains in the distance.

Landscape with shades of gold and green in the grasses and trees, and a soft sky that looks like watercolor.

010

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

Pick up the nearest book. Turn to page 42, post the second sentence. “Will the heat waves blur me sufficiently?”

Book cover. General Ehrlich. Author of The Solace Of Open Spaces. Islands, the Universe, Home. In the center is a painting of a gray and white mountain against a blue and white sky. Dark trees in the foreground.

000

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Maggie Smith just stirring souls. I think about this one a lot.

In the Grand Scheme of Things

It sounds like someone wound up the wrens
and let them go, let them chatter across your lawn

like cheap toys, and from here an airplane
seems to fly only from one tree to another, barely

chalking a line between them. We say the naked eye
as if the eye could be clothed, as if it isn't the world

that refuses to undress unless we turn our backs.
It shows us what it chooses, nothing more,

and it's not waxing pastoral. There is too much
now at stake. The skeletal rattle you hear

at the window could be only the hellion roses
in the wind, their thorns etching the glass,

but it could be bones. The country we call ours
isn't, and it's full of them. Every year you dig

that goddamn rose bush from the bed, spoon it
from soil like a tumor, and every year it grows back

thick and wild. We say in the grand scheme of things
as if there were one. We say that's not how

the world works as if the world works.

000

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

For this #smallpoemsunday, a poem inspired by a video a friend sent me.

FIRE, IN WINTER

The fox is a throat with a body attached
and she meets it with stillness,
with the kind of calm
that makes emergency possible.

It screams. Listen: a heart that big
will howl, will make you think
the world is ending
when really it's just lonely.

The sound cracks the air in half. She stays steady as snow accumulating.
The fox finishes. Trots away.
Leaves the breath of its howl hanging there.

0114

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 11/01/2026

One from Federico García Lorca and one from me on this #smallpoemsunday.

The Whole Works

The wind's hand
caresses the forehead of space
again &
again.
The stars half-close
their blue eyelids
again &
again.

CONSERVATORY

I would visit
but visit is the wrong word.
I would but. I would.

You keep appearing in my mouth
like a word I can't swallow. Unlikely
as a flower that blooms
when no one is looking.

I'm looking. You're looking.
The flower is on fire.

021

Sylvie Liebert @sqliebert.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

In the interest of injecting some joy into the timeline on this day… today is my 1 year anniversary of starting HRT. To say it has been life changing is an understatement. Waiting to start, even after coming out, was necessary but agonizing. First picture is day one. Second picture is today.