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Dr Sweet Machine

@sweetmachine.bsky.social

519 followers 290 following 205 posts

Supernova with human skin. Author of We the Destroyers & Borrowing Your Body (Riot in Your Throat) & All Sex and No Story (Rabbit Catastrophe). she/her. linktr.ee/laurapassin

Posts Replies Media

Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

I am so thrilled to share that “Poem in Which I Fail to Teach Homer“ was selected for the Pushcart Prize! Thank you to @riotinyourthroat.bsky.social for your amazing support. I am so honored!

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Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

Whitman. Resist much, obey little.

Walt Whitman's poem:

TO THE STATES.
TO the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist
much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-
ward resumes its liberty.

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Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Happy 5th birthday to Riot in Your Throat press, which I am so grateful to be a part of! To celebrate 5 successful years, all books are on sale for $10 for the month of January--including mine! riotinyourthroat.com

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Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

"Inheritance," from my brand-new book We the Destroyers, available 10/1 from Riot in Your Throat: riotinyourthroat.com/product/we-t... #smallpoemsunday

INHERITANCE
The family tree
in an alphabet
I can’t read
because my great-
grandfather lived
to lose his god
and I was given
to another. A palimpsest
of dangerous genes.
An eyeblink of a memory
of snow, the lake,
the star-strewn lake,
oh, the lake in the snow.

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Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

Denver folks! I'm going to be reading from my new book, WE THE DESTROYERS, on 9/20! It will in support of my friend Chad Heltzel's brand-new book. See details below!

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Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

I love #smallpoemsunday! Here's one that appears in my forthcoming book, We the Destroyers: "10,000 Feet Above Sea Level," originally published in @moistpoetryjournal.bsky.social.

10,000 Feet Above Sea Level
by Laura Passin

A hummingbird hangs like a drone,
tries to sip nectar from my breasts.

My father told me he and my mother,
three marriages ago, camped in this same park,
breathing each other inside the thin sky.

Sometimes you are the flower.

Sometimes you are the elegy yourself.

Sometimes you are the elsewhere,
the seas, ineluctably rising.

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Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

Riot in Your Throat is having a book sale in honor of #TheSealeyChallenge! All books from the press are $10 through July, including BORROWING YOUR BODY & WE THE DESTROYERS (available this fall). Check it out--and get some books by my fabulous pressmates! riotinyourthroat.com/book-catalog/

Graphic with book covers of Borrowing Your Body and We the Destroyers by Laura Passin. The words "Sealey Challenge Book Sale, $10" appear above and below the book covers. Text on the side says "NOTE: We the Destroyers will not ship until late September"

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Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

My book, Borrowing Your Body, is still on holiday sale for another week--as are all the books at Riot in Your Throat press! #PoetrySky riotinyourthroat.com/book-catalog/

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Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 17/05/2024

Which law enforcement agency should I expect to arrest me with this one

Book cover of "Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction" by David Seed

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Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 30/04/2024

Every Chotining is a Greek tragedy

Tweet by @hamnox that reads: RIP to everyone killed by the gods for their hubris but im different. And better. Maybe even better than the gods

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Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 08/09/2023

Thrilled to have my little love poem, "If the Sun Explodes We Will Not Know for Eight Minutes," in the Queer Environment special issue of @moistpoetryjournal.bsky.social ! queerenvironment.wordpress.com/.../if-the-s...

List of author names on greenish blue background, with "Queer Environment" on the side

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Dr Sweet Machine @sweetmachine.bsky.social · 24/07/2023

In case you didn't see it elsewhere, my new poem "This Regularly Happens" appears in RHINO 2023! Very honored to have this one in the world

This Regularly Happens

after The Onion headline “'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”

During the lockdown drill I forget to wait
for the code word that means ALL CLEAR

is real and not part of the disaster,
an easy trick learned by everyone

who grew up with active shooter drills,
which is to say: everyone younger than me.

I let the students start talking again,
their nervous energy visible

like motion lines in the manga
my white friends read in high school

and then the loudspeaker speaks
the code I’d forgotten. The students stop

dead, look at me with unsimulated fear:
I had made a mistake.

Twenty years ago I was in college, waiting
for CNN’s video to buffer

because the whole world
was watching the Columbine kids

climb out their windows, drop God
knows how far to the ground.

I still can’t breathe
when I remember the arm

in the window frame
letting go of the arm dangling below.

Thirty years ago my mother quit teaching
when a boy punched her in the face.

She tried to break up a fight,
became the fight instead.

She walked out
and never walked in again.

I look back in my students’ faces,
their freckled worries fighting

their impossible youth,
say something like Good, that was the real

ALL CLEAR, if this weren’t a drill…
and try not to show in my body

what I see in my mind:
their bodies, the gun,

my foolish hand
still opening the door.

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