iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 2h

Harryette Mullen ♥️

$What Draws Us Together When we come together, what shapes the space around, defines the ground between us? Which hand traces the outline of a body? If we are together, what gesture completes the picture? Whose perception fills in missing lines, suggesting a profile? If we stand together, must unity resolve the multiplicity of our infinite fracture? What proportion is each figure? When we go together, what is the simple form we make? Who fits our edges snugly, composing a whole? Whose eye searches the landscape for a focal point?$

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~ Alison Peace @irishali13.bsky.social · 18h

You cannot use someone else's fire; you can only use your own. And to do that, you must first be willing to believe you have it. ~ Audre Lorde

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Swetha Amit @swethaamit.bsky.social · 7h

Bay Area folks- Join Yi Shun Lai Mike Copperman and myself for a wonderful Litquake panel discussion .about sports and identity on October 14th Wednesday, 6:30 pm Sports Basement, 1590 Bryant St, San Francisco. Link litquake2026.sched.com/event/2WDms/...

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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 14h

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

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Jill Kitchen @jillkitchen.bsky.social · 7h

I still can’t quite believe I have a poem in this magical issue of Alaska Quarterly Review behind this gorgeous cover photograph. Many thanks to Ronald Spatz for including my work in these pages. (Photo taken beneath the magnolia tree where I wrote “a sudden chorus”.)

Image a hand holding the Summer & Fall 2026 issue of AQR Alaska Quarterly Review beneath a magnolia tree with a photograph close-up of plants and succulents and blueberries

Image of the Table of Contents of the AQR Alaska Quarterly Review Summer and Fall 2026 issue

Jill Kitchen
a sudden chorus
magnolia leaf like a shield like a dress you could make into armor into a crown to keep off the unwanted advances of ice storm
fiber thick enough to eat to line your gut to make a home a shelter even a width of blanket woven with the flex & bend
of honeysuckle vine the kind that sings virginia sweet not the red spears you planted in colorado that waited
until you were leaving to bloom to salute the sad curl of avocado grown from seed during early days of pandemic
suddenly surprised to find itself in high altitude & winter after being born into fruit in mexico does the cherry tree
remember how you held her caressed the soil at her edges wondered over her white summons of flowering her june of cherries

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 7h

Stanley Plumly

OCTOBER TREE

IT stands yellow
in front of the house,
probably ten feet higher,
maple, I think—the full leaf
wide as an open hand.
It is the only yellow
on the block, and so thick with itself
rain may not finally
reach its inward body,
nor wind lie down inside.

The upstairs windows
cut it into sections,
some yellower than others,
some burning off
into a flat flame.
But like the movement
in all still things
it is alive beyond such changes,
and even in darkness
has presence, window
by window.

STANLEY PLUMLY

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Stone Circle Review @stonecirclereview.bsky.social · 14h

Over the years, I have gotten more interested in building multiplicity into my writing. I’ve been experimenting with how much I can pour into the poem. -- Lauren Camp

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Kathy Fish @kathyfish.bsky.social · 15h

Hey friends, I’m offering two opportunities to write with me and a small cohort of other writers in southern France in May of next year! A couple of spots left in each session. See inside for details. 💙 www.artofflashfiction.com/retreats/cre...

Black and white photo of smiling me, hair in ponytail, patterned scarf over left shoulder, big glasses.

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Veronika Fuchs @veronikafuchs.bsky.social · 19h

Days as if pulled from Anne Carson's Glass, Irony and God: "To live here one must forget much."

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 19h

Celebrating the 1st book birthday of @saraswatinagpal.bsky.social's Drench Me in Silver published by @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social 💜 Here's a favourite poem 'Chai' which explores the nuance and tensions between culinary rituals and domestic and cultural dynamics. A stunning collection all round!

A photo of Drench Me in Silver by Saraswati Nagpal, published by Black Bough Poetry.

'Chai' from Drench Me in Silver by Saraswati Nagpal, published by Black Bough Poetry.

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Burgi Zenhaeusern @burgi.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

"I want you to know it too." Two poems by Najwan Darwish from NO ONE WILL KNOW YOU TOMORROW (Yale Margellos, 2024), transl. Kareem James Abu-Zeid, for #smallPoemSunday. @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Land

Land, how much misery
you've brought to your people.
They're wretched when they have you,
wretched when they lose you.

Land, if only
we could inhabit the clouds.

Lost

That which is lost for forever,
that which that no one knows
but me–
I want you to know it too.
If it's lost but you know it
it's as if
it was never lost.

My hands are open,
and in every home I pour it out–
the childhood
I once had.

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Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

WCW

Vast and grey, the sky
is a simulacrum
to all but him whose days
are vast and grey, and—
In the tall, dried grasses
a goat stirs
with nozzle searching the ground.
—my head is in the air
but who am I…?
And amazed my heart leaps
at the thought of love
vast and grey
yearning silently over me.

(The Desolate Field by William Carlos Williams)

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~ Alison Peace @irishali13.bsky.social · 18h

It was like getting a love letter from a tree Eyes closed forever to find you... There is a life which, if I could have it I would have chosen for myself from the beginning… ~ Franz Wright

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Matthew Murrey ♥️ from LITTLE JOY (Cornerstone Press) Happy #smallpoemsunday! @mytwords.bsky.social @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Before the Dancers,

their shadows.
Before the fire, the hanging
breath. Before the kiss, the toss
and turn. Before the poem,
the page. Before death, sleep—
or was it death, then sleep?
Maybe I've had it wrong all along:
maybe the dancers, then their shadows.

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Sam Garvan @garvansam.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Beautiful and enigmatic poem by Rilke ..

Before Summer Rain

Suddenly, from all the green around you,
something-you don't know what-has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood

you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour

will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide
away from us, cautiously, as though
they weren't supposed to hear what we are saying.

And reflected on the faded tapestries now;
the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long
childhood hours when you were so afraid.

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Litbowl @litbowl.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This poem forever. From Robert Bly's Morning Poems: bookshop.org/a/862/9780060928735 #booksky #writing

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Deborah @deborahzafer.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Why won't you live in it

The Whole Thing Is the Hard Part
Heather Christle

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Moby Dick @mobydickatsea.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

all this is both foolish and unnecessary

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River River Books @riverriverbooks.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Pour a second cup of coffee and peruse this new review of Jameela Dallis’s Encounters for the Living and the Dead featured in North Carolina Poetry Society! 📚💜 #poetry #booksky Read here: www.ncpoetrysociety.org/review-of-en...

Sea creature background and the text:

"[Dallis] transforms witnessing from passive observation into an active form of
remembrance."

Mary Maceda reviews Encounters for the Living and the Dead for North Carolina Poetry Society

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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

That is between me and my shadow.

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Lee Potts @leepottspoet.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Please celebrate with me my friends! 🎉 My third chapbook, Sky In Some Mosaic, is now available for preorder from the wonderful Pinhole Poetry Press (@pinholepoetry.bsky.social). Each copy will be made by hand and beautiful. Link in bio. More information to follow.

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Frog and Toad Bot @frogandtoadbot.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Frog and Toad sat on the porch, feeling sad together.

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Anteroom (formerly The Winged Moon) @anteroompoetry.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Continuing to share the beautiful work from #Biophilia, and today not one, but two poems from the very talented @jenwithwords.bsky.social. Read them here: www.anteroompoetry.com/biophilia/je...

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Davi Gray (she/they) @davigray.com · 03/10/2026

All the Lands We Inherit now available at the Hennepin County Library 😍 Thanks to @susanlleary.bsky.social for the lead

Screenshot from library app: 6 copies available, hold requested.

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Pat Foran @pdforan.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

“Sparrows asleep inside a glass violin.” @susanlleary.bsky.social and @darkwebtofu.bsky.social in @diodeeditions.bsky.social

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Ian McMillan @imcmillan.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

A poem from my new @carcanet.bsky.social collection Red River Valley

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Litbowl @litbowl.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

From Linda Pastan's book, Queen of a Rainy Country: bit.ly/lindaqueenLB #poem #booksky #writing

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Burgi Zenhaeusern @burgi.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I love the game of hide-and-seek the poems in BLOODSTREAM play with passion, how they spring their fire upon a reader. 😊🔥💖 BLOODSTREAM by Sarah Carey (Mercer University Press, 2026) #poetry #bookSky 📚💙

The cover of Bloodstream depicts a color drawing of a flowering passion flower vine winding around the title and the author's name and beyond the cover's frame, on a greenish white ground.

Globus

I wake hungry, restless, stuck–
something I can't swallow. Forgive me
wanting more than a god

can give, I pray. I want to believe
divinity lives–within my body,
out of my hands. Years ago, I passed

the peace of the Lord in a pew.
Now, I toss, I want
my peace back. I reckon with the arbiter

who shuffles order, the shark who deals
luck like cards. I turn,
I tuck my head, take from childlessness

a holy solitude, a shell. Call me
mollusk, crustacean, reptile-
in-exile. Imagine Marvell's drop of dew–

so self-contained! But I know better,
I know burrows, dreams beyond
the terminus of my ancestral thread.

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Glass Poetry Press @glasspoetry.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

ICYMI - it's Thursday! Chapbook submissions are open!! www.glass-poetry.com/submissions....

glass-poetry.com

Submissions Guidelines | Glass Poetry Press

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Perugia Press @perugiapress.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Perugia Press’s annual prize is open NOW and through November 15. Open to women poets, inclusive of gender-expansive identities, who have not published more than one full-length collection. Full guidelines and submission info at linktree in bio. We look forward to reading your work! 💙📖🍂

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Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Natsume Soseki, tr. Soiku Shigematsu

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Delighted to have a new poem "Queerness of Our Species" in @rowanglassworks.bsky.social Issue 33! Also a special "Looking Glass" feature with meta-discursive insights about my poem plus a video reading 🔥 Thank you to EIC Katie Budris for including me in this gorgeous issue! Link below 🤍 #poetry

Queerness of Our Species

Vikki C.

Male penguins raise three young, said the headline.
The two had chased the female off, right after she’d laid eggs.
By dusk, the couple had planned the whole family.

Another cruelty to convention. Another soft survival.

It isn’t for us to know if the mother is still alive,
so the story pickaxes at unknowns,
becoming thinner as days glow and contract.

The moment we chose each other, the soft down
between us began to molt, leaving the bare cage of our hands,
the bony lamps of our shoulder blades.

There’s no word for such quickening anymore.

My own weather froze the feather I witnessed on my
way out to Portobello—but never enough to fix it
to the icy ledge. The same ledge I was known

to lean out from—man-watching with a bear’s hunger.

The tiny plume lifted sharp on a white wind,
sailing off to the place where the tender ring.
Later, I read that the mother penguin was found,

circling her young—but now thinks them all corrupt.

The two males clean out of sight—still famed
for their strange deed. It’s unclear who abandoned whom,
only that things circled, our feet slipping beneath dun grass

—till we raised each other again, out of more-than-human nature.

That Sunday, armed with market flowers and brown paper bags,
I brought back your favourite fish for supper—though
you were unlikely to attend. I hoped we’d dine together again.

Late light flooding the kitchen. Scent of herbs and fatigue,

the fish glittering on the large wooden board.
Its one marble eye turning from clear to cloudy
—a small heaven, keenly looking out for your return.

That Sunday, armed with market flowers and brown paper bags,
I brought back your favourite fish for supper—though
you were unlikely to attend. I hoped we’d dine together again.

Late light flooding the kitchen. Scent of herbs and fatigue,

the fish glittering on the large wooden board.
Its one marble eye turning from clear to cloudy
—a small heaven, keenly looking out for your return.

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Exact Editions @exacteditions.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Happy #NationalPoetryDay! 'Orpheus in Spring' by Jenny George celebrates this year's theme "wonder," describing the human impulse to collect treasures, and the opposite action of admiring the world without taking. The poem is from The Poetry Review, official publication of @poetrysociety.org.uk.

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Hannah V Warren @hannahvwarren.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

After travel & a new semester & deadlines &&&, I've whipped up a newsletter. New poem! Photographs of Parisian skulls! Writing prompt! And a reflection on how men insist on nurturing women's fear. Over the next few months, I'll use this newsletter to share info about...

hannahvwarren.eo.page

Hannah V Warren's Newsletter

This is a meta description. This will often show up in search results.

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University of Akron Press @uakronpress.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

ICYMI: CONGRATULATIONS TO EMMA TRELLES WHO WON THE 2026 AKRON POETRY PRIZE! 🎉 Full contest announcement here: www.uakron.edu/uapress/akro...

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Lisa Thornton @thorntonforreal.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Showing her around

A copy of “We’ll Be Birds” flash chapbook out now with Sand and Gravel Press balanced on my trailer hitch in the side yard

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Veronika Fuchs @veronikafuchs.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

There is, I know, a science of separation In night's disheveled elegies, stifled laments, The clockwork oxen jaws, the tense anticipation As the city's vigil nears its sun and end. Osip Mandelstam, from Tristia thanks to @samrasnake.bsky.social theamericanscholar.org/five-poems-o...

theamericanscholar.org

Five Poems - The American Scholar

Translations by Christian Wiman

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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.

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poemtoday.bsky.social @poemtoday.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

To White Noise You are the sound silence makes in its sleep, air made visible by smoke, deepest breath with no breathing, O my personal ocean, O un- broken shush of mortality, O my digital sister, thank you, thank you for keeping the children from climbing over the fence of sleep. Carrie Fountain

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~ Alison Peace @irishali13.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Poem for October 1.2026 ~LEILA CHATTI Once in a While I Am Reminded —I am not at the center of anything. Seen at a distance, I am hardly seen./ I marvel at what I call my life/the narrative sags, and I each moment wondering if this is when the real story starts.

LEILA CHATTI
Once in a While I Am Reminded
I am not at the center of anything. Seen at a distance I am hardly seen. Excruciating, how here 1 am, how little
it means. I use my mouth to make sounds which approximate my innermost thoughts but often bungle it. I use my eyes when I need to be understood. Sometimes I tell the truth but only when I think I'll be valued for being interesting instead of good.
I marvel at what I call my life-ambulances, sparrows, clouds passing definitively by-amazed that it doesn't know it's mine at all, the minor characters don't look up, the narrative sags, and I each moment wondering if this is when the real story starts.

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Ulrica Hume @uhume.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

the trouble with the dead is that sometimes they are the only ones who would understand.

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Chris Abani 💙 An “ordinary” Wednesday poem for #weirdpoemwednesday! @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Poet of an Ordinary Heartbreak

Who hasn't been tempted by the sharp edge of a knife?
An ordinary knife cutting ordinary tomatoes on an ordinary slab of wood on an ordinary Wednesday.
The knife nicks, like a bite to the soul. A reminder that what is contemplated is as real as the blood sprouting from a finger. As real as a bruised eye.
Instead turn back to the meat stewing on the stove.
Scrape pulpy red flesh into the heat and turn.
Say: even this is a prayer. Even this.

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Saeed Jones @theferocity.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This will be a thread of essays I recommend to students in my creative nonfiction workshop:

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RHINO Poetry @rhinopoetry.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

LAST CHANCE to send us your poems for the 2027 Founders' Prize! Get those submissions in—we can't wait to read them! Submit: bit.ly/founders27

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Frog and Toad Bot @frogandtoadbot.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Toad sipped his tea. “Frog,” he asked, “are you making this up?” “Maybe yes and maybe no,” said Frog.

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