iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Monday July 20th at 7 PM in Ridgefield CT I'm reading with the extraordinary Charles Rafferty for Barb Jennes Poetry in the Garden series. The reading takes place at the beautiful Keeler Tavern Museum 152 Main Street.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

My new prose poem from the latest issue of Thea Swanson's Club Plum including work by David Hanlon, Laura Vrcek, and so much more. #prosepoetry #newpoetry #poem

Winter Fugue

The world becomes singing or erasure? How my own father forgot my name. It was winter and he lived far away. He called me by his dead brother’s name. Did he know, too, I was his son? We misspeak all the time. And then our words float away in sound. I listen to the wind batter the house. How strong it blows off the lake. It reminds me of the television at night turning to static when I was young. First the national anthem, then the signal going out. I swore I could hear voices in the static. What did they say? I swear off the lake I hear my father saying his brother’s name. I step outside in shorts and a t-shirt and let it wrap itself around me. We are always trying to stay standing. I hear my father calling in the wind. If I lay down the snow would cover me like a shroud. I go inside and shiver. My father’s voice is everywhere. Even silence is a form of singing. It’s as if he’s standing right beside me, then he is gone as if he was snow melting on the ground.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

One of two prose pieces I have in the lastest fine issue of Broadkill Review

After Visiting Hours

What is this grass as if the blades are strings that sing? I think this in the park outside the hospital. It is summer and the cicadas are whirring back and forth as dusk places her mauve tongue upon the trees. Soon the dark holds me, as I sit smoking on a bench. If I look I can see a window where you rest in a room hooked up to machines. A Junebug the shape of a cello lands on my arm, then departs—Helter skelters into the air, bumping into the streetlight and falling onto the sidewalk. I see the swarms of gnats in the streetlight’s halo and hear the soft hush of the moths. If I were to pray, there is no need to ask to enter the Temple. I am little more than an ember in the dark. We are so holy, small and frail.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

So glad to have a couple poems up at Richard Long's 2Rivers with all of these fine poets. Link in the comments:

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

My poem from the new beautifully done Nixes Mate

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

This is about to drop. An anthology to speak to power. I got a little poem in it alongside all kinds of great work.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Dwayne Betts' new book Doggeral is the book we need. I needed. Right now. To travel fiercely through this time of grief and not let it swallow fully who we are and our connection to life, joy, heart, hope.

Grief. The story of Easy, a small dog I imagine is named after Mosley's detective, crawls into the space left by Zinnia, burrowing into corners, against doorframes, beneath a house, in search of a phantom smell..

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Sarah Carson from her powerful book How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Franz Wright from his posthumous At His Desk in the Past published by Foundlings Press

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

Great thanks to Azad Repiwar for translating my poem "Father" into Kurdish and having it published in the Kurdish lit journal LEWerger. The poem was originally published in the US journal The Blue Earth Review where it was a runnerup for their prize. The original in English is in the alt notes.

Father

Now I know why we men
are born with broad shoulders:
to carry this long grief
of our father’s going
hoisting it to our shoulders
like a coffin.
But how will I carry you
to the woods
when you lived
past the years
when I was a working man
and could lift with ease
the spade, the stone.
Now what I’ve earned
is the shame
of the son
who pushes his father’s
wheelchair
knowing it is the chair
holding me up.

Cover of the Kurdish lit journal LEWerger. Or maybe it is W LEWerger. It is issue and many folks appear on the rover including me and some poets I do not know, current an ancient.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 14/01/2025

Such a beautiful mouthful is this small lyric by my friend Richard Foerster, from the Bennington Review.

Plein-Air Sketch. A charcoal smudge lifts from a willow on the creek's far bank. It trails a scrap of awe from my throat. I have no other voice but that dark sheen's raw calling.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

This is why we write poems in the great lakes. What else are we to do? Two deep even for snowmen or angels.

Picture of a car buried in over four feet of snow and shadow.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Another fine poem from Tony Leuzzi's Fog Notes. This one is a lifetime in nine lines.

you fifty years. //Meanwhile there are kites and church/a winking light in ribboned fog// tax breaks, bone grafts/skeins of jazz, and in-between/each in-between the story/of your first wool suit: you//wore it once and passed it on.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Such a fine tiny poem, full of mystery. There are so many moving poems in Tony Leuzzi's book Fog Notes, and some of the best short form poems ever. Here is one of my favorites that I memorized and often say to myself like a dark little prayer. #poetry

When a hand meets a door/ one expects that it will open--/the hand, not the door. /The door is closed forever.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty @stdougherty.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

From Justin Hamm's series of erasures in his new book O Death

Like a horse whipped amid a chorus of laughter a woman standing near the top in the shadow of her shadow. An Erasure from James Joyce's The Dead

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