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Susan L. Leary

@susanlleary.bsky.social

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · Aug 14

🌸COVER REVEAL🌸 for MORE FLOWERS & it’s a beauty! I’m grateful to so many: @triohousepress.org, @krisbigalk.bsky.social, @natashakane.bsky.social & to @fascicles.bsky.social, @kcbrattpfotenhauer.bsky.social, & @cynthiamhoffman.bsky.social for their kind, generous words!

Pre-order link in comments!

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 6h

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 7h

“Everything ends up being an ode to death.”

—Martha Silano in TERMINAL SURREAL (@acrebooks.bsky.social)

DEATH POEM

Death is the one-day-alive mayfly clinging to a watering can.
When the grass turns brown, how can I not think of death?
In my heart, death lives like a mama raccoon with her two young.
We haven't figured out a way to undo death.
Death awaits the pigeon on a roof, says the Cooper's hawk.
It's not cool to mention corpse beetles when there's a death.
Did you know there's a death's-head hawkmoth?
A scrub jay squawks death, death, death!
Dragonflies and death: they live about six months.
Eating is for sure some kind of elaborate death feast.
Sometimes death is invisible, especially when we laugh.
Our planet: one big tribute concert to death.
Death be not proud, says John Donne, but death is proud, I think.
Everything ends up being an ode to death.

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Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 10h

Everything that we've known, and come to count on,
has fled the world.

Charles Wright, from Sestets 🍂

Our Days Are Political, but Birds Are Something Else

Tenth month of the year.
Fallen leaves taste bitter. And grass.
Everything that we've known, and come to count on,
has fled the world.
Their bones crack in the west wind.
Where are the deeds we're taught to cling to?
How I regret having missed them,
and their mirrored pieces of heaven.
Like egrets, they rise in the clear sky,
their shadows like distance on the firred hills.

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Robyn Schindeldecker @flyrobynfly.bsky.social · 10h

These lilacs clearly didn't get the memo that it's October.

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Kamran Javadizadeh @kjavadizadeh.bsky.social · 12h

Inger Christensen, from alphabet (trans. Susanna Nied)

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 13h

literally everything is better when i’m reading a good book

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Koss (she/they/Aquarian) @kossworks.bsky.social · 13h

Two Kinds of Unrequited Pink Friendship
#paint, #unrequited, #friendship, #art

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Darren C. Demaree @darrencdemaree.bsky.social · 16h

Many thanks to the editors of @emergejournal.bsky.social for including one of my Emily as poems in their new issue.

emergeliteraryjournal.com/emily-as-ecc...

Emily as Ecce Ancilla Domini by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

by Darren Demaree Yellow matters. Blue matters more. I offer a flower she doesn’t want & if that’s all I can do then red will never matter. Good lord, white is a wrinkled mess. Emily wants to b…

emergeliteraryjournal.com

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Forgotten Poets @forgottenpoets.bsky.social · 14h

.
From 'Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings' (2015)
—Joy Harjo

#poetry #poem #booksky

Fall Song

It is a dark fall day.
The earth is slightly damp with rain.
I hear a jay.
The cry is blue.

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phillip crymble @phillipcrymble.bsky.social · 1d

Victoria Chang

Late Wonders

My face is now gone.
Instead, I have a hawk's face.
None of the poets
notice, they only want fame.
Fame is a bucket of eyes.

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eileen chengyin chow @chowleen.bsky.social · 1d

War creates two categories of persons: those who
outlive it and those who don’t.

Both carry wounds.

-Anne Carson
#everynightapoem

трайна
"wound"
HISTORY OF WAR: LESSON 2
War creates two categories of persons: those who outlive it and those who don't.
Both carry wounds.

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Alina Stefanescu @alinaetc.bsky.social · 1d

the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

- Galway Kinnell, "The Bear"

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 18h

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Variant Literature @variantlit.bsky.social · 2d

Guess what? We're opening for poetry and prose submissions later this month! Official date coming soon!

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T. (Tammy) Greenwood @tgwood505.bsky.social · 1d

My daily #peace offering. #vermont #photography #photographer #photographers #nature #protectyourpeace #reflections #nature #mothernature #naturephotography #northeastkingdom

Dreamy orange creamsicle sunset over a still pond in autumn with a birch tree.

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Adrian Dallas Frandle @adrianf.bsky.social · 23h

painted with pokeberry the cooper’s hawk we saw at the bird bath yesterday

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David Wojo @mrwojorising.bsky.social · 20h

Psst! Need an amazing book cover? Or a beautiful, eye-pleasing interior? Give David (me, I'm David) a shot! Check out my portfolio here: www.davidwojo.com

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Kelli Russell Agodon @kelliagodon.bsky.social · 4d

"her memory is a cloud she can't hold..."

Lots of feels with this poem for my mum. Sent with love for anyone with a parent or loved one with Alzheimer's/dementia. It's a journey.

(And thank you @poetsorg.bsky.social and Rick Barot for sharing this one. It means a lot.)

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Amorak Huey @amorak.bsky.social · 19h

Hannah Arendt —

This was the farewell:
Many friends came with us
and whoever did not come was no longer a friend.

This was the evening:
Haltingly, it slowed our pace, and drew our souls out the window.

This was the train:
Measuring the country in flight
and slowing as it passed through many cities.

This is the arrival:
Bread is no longer called bread
and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation.

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Rhona Greene @rhonagreene.bsky.social · 19h

🤩This is going to be a real treat!

‘In the Blueprint
Of
Her Iris’

A gorgeous collaboration featuring
Poems by @vikkicwrites.bsky.social
and
Art by @rfredekenter.bsky.social

Published @icefloepress.bsky.social
What a dream combination. So exciting!
Congratulations Vikki & Robert 💐💖💫

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Burgi Zenhaeusern @burgi.bsky.social · 3d

This poem is from a delicious dialogue between Persephone and Jesus in Pádraig Ó Tuama's Kitchen Hymns (@coppercanyonpress.bsky.social, 2024). The part it's in is called "In a Garden by a Gate."
I love this book!
#poetry #bookSky 📚💙

For Such a Time as This

Your mother said your father was
a god, she said. Mine said that too,

and I see what your god does.
Abandons, tests, and traps you.

Asks for more. And more. Then more
than anyone is capable of doing.

That is not divinity.
That is a weak imagination.

I'm beginning to agree, he said,
but I don't believe he'd change.

I'm talking about you, she said.

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Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 21h

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living.

Mark Strand

xxiu • On Becoming a Poet
ever their subject happens to be. They have a voice, and the formation of that voice, the gathering up of imagined sound into utter-ance, may be the true occasion for their existence. A poem may be the residue of an inner urgency, one through which the self wishes to register itself, write itself into being, and, finally, to charm another self, the reader, into belief. It may also be something equally elusive-the ghost within every experience that wishes it could be seen or felt, acknowledged as a kind of meaning.
It could be a truth so forgiving that it offers up, a humanness in which we are able to imagine ourselves. A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxi-cally, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

Mark Strand, from The Making of the Poem

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Catherine Rockwood @martin65.bsky.social · 1d

"A Tinderbox Itself Is Innocent," from _Dogwitch_, up at the Wardrobe c/o the Sundress Blog today.

sundressblog.com/2025/10/10/t...

The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Dogwitch by Catherine Rockwood - The Sundress Blog

This selection, chosen by guest editor nat raum, is from Dogwitch by Catherine Rockwood (Bottlecap Press, 2025). A Tinderbox Itself Is Innocent Last night my husband dreameda long fenced-in yard. At t...

sundressblog.com

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Jane Zwart (she/her) @janezwart.bsky.social · 1d

So grateful to @ctsalazar.bsky.social for vouching for Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best.
If you're disposed to take his word for things, as I am, please pre-order (or nudge your buddies).
Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, poems by Jane Zwart | Orison Books share.google/7HFw4ReVpSr6...

cover of Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, featuring Joseph Cornell's L'Humeur Vagabonde, a 4 by 4 shelf with glass & cardboard & seashell curiosities.

Endorsement of Oddest & Oldest & Safest & Best by C.T. Salazar, also in more accessible version here:
Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, poems by Jane Zwart | Orison Books https://share.google/7HFw4ReVpSr6yUgke

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Community Building Art Works @missionbelonging.bsky.social · 16d

🪶 ✨ Join us Thurs, 10/23 @ 7 PM ET on Zoom for a workshop with @chenchenwrites.bsky.social! We'll explore a poetry form using only the letters in your name. Discover how this constraint boosts creativity through examples and hands-on creation. 🎟️ More & Register: chenchen2025.eventbrite.com?aff=Bsky

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