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Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · 22h

🔥 🔥 🔥

Glass Poetry Press @glasspoetry.bsky.social · 23h

Today on Glass!

"with my back to the city" by Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey (@esmepromise.bsky.social)!

www.glass-poetry.com/journal.html

Image of fire

Text: So I will meet you
at the summit. Dirt
in my stomach —
gardens of it.

Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey

with my back to the city

https://www.glass-poetry.com/journal.html

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Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · 5d

how the hell am I supposed to quit smoking when I'm in the midst of this fascist takeover AND while Billie Corgan thinks he can drain my bank account just so he can remind me I'm now the age of everyone I stuck my rage in a cage for when I was a tiny impressionable child ffs I really really want a c

Countdown to Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness 30th Anniversary Edition

2

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · 9d

Tell your friends!

Or tell that file in your documents, you know the one, the one you never tell anyone about, called X-Files Poems or What Kind of World Will We Leave for Keith Richards: Poems, or Everything Was Great Until I Watched A Quiet Place 2.

You know I like the weird manuscripts 😬

Glass Poetry Press @glasspoetry.bsky.social · 9d

psst....

we open for chapbook submissions in two days (October 1).

www.glass-poetry.com/submissions....

Submissions Guidelines | Glass Poetry Press

www.glass-poetry.com

4 14

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · 13d

Today, I've cut back from 2 cigarettes an hour, to 1 every two hours.

Also today, I haven't yelled at anyone.

Yet.

2

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · 15d

Capitalism really will be the end of us all

1

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · 15d

I assume it's five minutes after I leave work 😒

1 1

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · 27d

Counter motion: cancel the rest of September

2 1

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · 27d

"Waitress" was on right before you came in 🤷‍♂️

3

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · 27d

It me 😬

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Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 31

I'm gonna have a buuuuusy September 😂

Make it even busier, friends ⬇️ ⬇️

Glass Poetry Press @glasspoetry.bsky.social · Aug 31

😯😯😯

www.glass-poetry.com/journal/subm...

2

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 20

Looks like I get to, once again, play everyone's favorite game:

Is That My Respirator's Strap I'm Feeling Behind My Ear or Is It A Cockroach?

Now if I could just figure out how to win... 😶

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 18

a close up of a cartoon dog holding a remote control .

Alt: a close up of a cartoon dog holding a remote control .

media.tenor.com

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 18

Happy Monday, Emma

:::Tony runs away very fast:::

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Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 16

💛

Reposted by Anthony Frame

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 15

Really thrilled to have a long poem with a title too long to fit in one of these posts in the new issue of Untelling. Many thanks to editor Melissa Helton and The Hindman Settlement School for including "Somewhere, Someone Must Know the Ending, or I Turned 42 Today; My Beard Is Filling..."

Somewhere, Someone Must Know the Ending, or I Turned 42 Today; My Beard Is Filling With Wizard-White Hairs; My Dulcimer Sits Dusty in the Living Room Corner; the Laundry and Dishes Are Piling Up Again; I Thought I Was Reading a Biography of Whitman but It’s Been More Like a Paperweight for the Past Four Months; I Haven’t Written Anything in Over a Year; and I’m Starting to Think That, Maybe, I Need to Start Thinking About Someone Other Than Myself

There’s a boy whose family moved in to the house next door last week, and he has spent the last hour jumping on his trampoline.

There’s a goldendoodle puppy chasing the air that surrounds the boy.

The parents in the house behind the boy's sing a nonsense song to their toddler while their five-year-old plays with a tiny basketball set.

There’s a calendula in my wife’s garden filled with aphids and filled with ants farming those aphids for honeydew.

The ants have such care as they carry the aphids in their mouths, placing them along the stem, under the leaves, as away as possible from the inevitable rain.

There’s a salvia that should have been divided a month ago.

The veteran down the street listens to a classic rock mix as he washes the matching brilliant black Harleys he and his wife own.

And the birds – O, the birds! – the birds carrying the wind of everywhere they’ve been during their migrations stop at our bird bath, a few splashes before hopping through our yard in search of the abundant worms.

The birds don’t mind us and we stand in wonder before them.

The stars are each in their kingdom, hidden for now beyond the big unbroken sky.

My wife on her kneeler, hunched over the garden path, pulls creeping charlie from between the pavers.

There are enough fragments of creeping charlie left behind in the soil for their return in a few weeks.

I’m meant to be present in the moment, the feel of the dirt on my cracked hands, the wind blowing my hair over my eyes, the dribble of the little mechanized fountain that draws the neighborhood wildlife to us.

The man who molested me lives in my head, but he is not alone.

This catalogue of mercies from our well-fed Earth, chives and pill bugs and lilies of the valley and robins, the neighbor boy and his dog, the dozen new perennials my wife ordered from the other end of the state – and O, what names! Penstemon and agastache and baptisia and astilbe! – and, when they arrived, secure in their cardboard boxes, she carefully dug and enriched all twelve holes and now they’re here, growing, photosynthesizing, ready soon to open their petals like a child’s eyes.

All of it, here in my head, jostling for position, for attention, bouncing between corneas and optical nerves and cortex, strolling on a paved path of photoreceptors.

There are honeybees and, tonight, back in their hive, they’ll hug each other as they sleep. Some may stay too long, may get too tired to journey home and decide, instead, to sleep inside our flowers.

The first kohlrabi stem is plump and glossy and ready for picking.

There’s an ivy cutting growing roots in a small glass of water on a window sill in my wife’s craft room.

The air plant, soil-less and free, hangs as if in flight from the kitchen ceiling, ready to collect every particle of life it needs just from the house’s humid air.

In the native corner of the garden, the viburnum is making plans to produce berries. Soon, so soon, it’ll only take a couple more years.

I’m meant to be present in the moment, my shoes wet from the dewy grass, my knees crunching as I squat down to grab a handful of weeds, my back sore in the glorious way only a day working in the yard can bring.

Someone has taught the squirrels to beg and they do it well.

I’m told my shatterstar brain is actually a superpower and I’m trying to embrace the excitable distractibility that makes me unable to see the oven mitts left on the microwave and the wide open deep freeze door, its melted frost dripping along the garage floor, the way I must speak my intentions to the world as if an incantation.

Yesterday, at the grocery store, a woman sneezed in the bread aisle and I had a panic attack while trying to find a decent peach.

I’m meant to be present in the moment, to breathe with the maple tree in the neighbor’s yard, to catch the fragments of light filtering through the ferns, to look long enough to see the coloring of the hummingbird as it darts from the blooming sage to the feeder to the telephone wire bisecting our corner of sky.

I promise the goddess in the garden that every pinch of forgiveness I’ve asked for will be paid back again and again and again.

Somewhere, someone is writing a song or a novella or lifting a baby from its crib, its wrinkled little legs flapping like wrinkled little wings.

I hope that baby isn’t crying.

I hope that someone, halfway across the world, feeling the chill of the season opposite mine, is watching the sky, wondering about the same stars I’m desperate to see this evening.

I hope that a toad or a snake moves in to our yard and startles me as it basks in morning light.

I hope that those dandelion seeds I blew last month landed somewhere moist and soft.

I hope the boy next door sleeps easy, his dog at the foot of his bed, the moonlight through his window casting a kaleidoscope across his eyes.

I hope that whoever is reading this is calm, sitting on a couch or in a chair or flat-backed in bed while someone they love is down the hall humming a song that reminds them, both of them, of being a child and running through grass, chasing the birds just to see them fly.

I hope. Again. I hope.

1 1 3

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 15

Really thrilled to have a long poem with a title too long to fit in one of these posts in the new issue of Untelling. Many thanks to editor Melissa Helton and The Hindman Settlement School for including "Somewhere, Someone Must Know the Ending, or I Turned 42 Today; My Beard Is Filling..."

1 1 3

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 10

okay okay okay but are these Fantastic Four Oreoes filled with *real* Fantastic Fours?

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 7

same

Hannah Cohen @hcohen.bsky.social · Aug 7

need a writing retreat where someone just bullies me into writing poetry again

4

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 3

👀 👀

I loved that game so much!

2

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 3

I grew up on these streets

4

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 1

There is no Zod; only Zuul

Ross White @rosswhite.com · Aug 1

We should call sending poems out to magazines “kneeling before Zod.”

1 4

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Aug 1

....

Pulled a few tomatoes today

😶😶😶

1

Reposted by Anthony Frame

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Jul 28

Truly honored to have my "Bootleg Poem" included in the anthology, Delicate Machinery: Poems on Survival & Healing. It is a powerful collection, which you can download for free. Thank you Erin Elizabeth Smith and @sundresspub.bsky.social for this book.

www.sundresspublications.com/e-anthologie...

“Delicate Machinery is far from its definition. Raw, gutting, unflinching, this anthology is the embodiment of all the feelings that exist, emerge and triumph in the face of trauma. With every word, the readers are forced to reckon with their own complicity in how they’ve created the environment that is conducive for sexual violence and ultimately, face the truth of the world we inhabit. I encourage anyone who names themselves a champion for human rights to pick up this collection and sit with its rawness–heed its call so we can fashion a safer and braver society, together, one reclamation at a time.”
-Najya Williams, author of On a Date with Disappointment

“Delicate Machinery takes survivorship poetics beyond catharsis––it is a beautifully curated gathering place for poets writing the unwritable, without apology. The poems collected here capture the beauty and intensity of living on after experiences sexual violence within a sociopolitical climate that denies us bodily autonomy.”
– [sarah] Cavar, author of Failure to Comply and Differential Diagnosis

$Bootleg Poem It starts with a boy and a Walkman, but no it started long before that. It’s late and he’s mowing the lawn as the stars start to shine behind the streetlights, his mother calls to him, dinner is ready, his brother yells at him, his leg screams with rose-bush-scratched knees, and his father is probably quiet, the quietest man he’s ever known, but he can only hear the rhythm of a piano, a song about horses and milkwood and demons. And no, it started long before that, too, when stars filled his eyes, concentrating on constellations instead of the man who crawled into the bed, the hand in his pants, the hand holding his mouth, his eyes searching for planets and satellites and black holes and a question: Can you see a black hole? Yes, he thought that, in that moment, at a time like that, and yes, it started even before that, the first fist to the ribs, the first shove into a locker, the first the second the third the fourth tears running off his cheeks, to his mouth, settling on his tongue, where they stayed, where they curled like a semicolon, like a tattoo, like a reminder, a lesson about silence and safety, and now he sees them, everyone calling him, their mouths a pantomime, a dissonant music video, as he turns the mower and his back on them, the song turning to its bridge, the strange piano nearly silencing the lyrics he doesn’t yet understand but feels moving under his skin. He needs this, this moment, this darkness, alone, to dream himself away. They call to him, and I want to say, no, for now, let him be an X-Man on the Starjammer, soaring through Shiar space, let him have spandex bursting against three-color stars. Maybe tomorrow he’ll be a Power Ranger or a Ninja Turtle, in church he’ll grow a tail and blue fur and save the life of the girl, the cute one with the freckles just like his who asked for his help with fractions, who touched his arm and,$

when he jumped, smiled and swore
she wouldn’t hurt him. But it started before all of this, before
the cassette he stole from his brother, before losing tug-of-war
to a girl, he and his tears kicked out of the classroom, before
his ripped pajamas, before his parents, long before the man
with the boy’s sperm on his hands and lips, back before
the first person spoke the first word, before the continental shift,
before the earliest wind and waves, the first volcanic explosion,
back when the first particulate collision destroyed that first,
endless silence. And it continues, after the lawn is finished,
the dinner cold and ruined, after the high school where he learned
to turn invisible, beyond to almost thirty years ahead, when
I can look at him and say, honestly, everything is not a fight
between silence and sound, when I can pluck the tears from
his tongue and say, tell me your secrets, all of them, even
the ones you’ve hidden from yourself, when I can hold him,
stilled like a memory, because he is a memory, a living recording
like the bootlegs we love, and because I can hold him
I can keep him calm as he tells me what I already know,
what neither of us knew how to say, and when I stroke his hair,
he doesn’t flinch, he doesn’t hide, he listens and, yes, he sobs,
and I sob, and I tell him to never stop looking to the sky,
I tell him the stars are like in the song: your demons can’t go there.
And maybe, together, we can make some sense of the silence
of this solar system, what we spent all those nights looking to,
our arms stretched as far as they could go, our hands grasping
and coming away empty, still empty now, but I know it’s okay,
I tell him it’s okay. Now, decades later, satellites took pictures
of a black hole. Now, I can show him the invisible, the unimaginable,
the impossible. Now, I can show him how beautiful it all is.

7 10

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Jul 28

Truly honored to have my "Bootleg Poem" included in the anthology, Delicate Machinery: Poems on Survival & Healing. It is a powerful collection, which you can download for free. Thank you Erin Elizabeth Smith and @sundresspub.bsky.social for this book.

www.sundresspublications.com/e-anthologie...

$Bootleg Poem It starts with a boy and a Walkman, but no it started long before that. It’s late and he’s mowing the lawn as the stars start to shine behind the streetlights, his mother calls to him, dinner is ready, his brother yells at him, his leg screams with rose-bush-scratched knees, and his father is probably quiet, the quietest man he’s ever known, but he can only hear the rhythm of a piano, a song about horses and milkwood and demons. And no, it started long before that, too, when stars filled his eyes, concentrating on constellations instead of the man who crawled into the bed, the hand in his pants, the hand holding his mouth, his eyes searching for planets and satellites and black holes and a question: Can you see a black hole? Yes, he thought that, in that moment, at a time like that, and yes, it started even before that, the first fist to the ribs, the first shove into a locker, the first the second the third the fourth tears running off his cheeks, to his mouth, settling on his tongue, where they stayed, where they curled like a semicolon, like a tattoo, like a reminder, a lesson about silence and safety, and now he sees them, everyone calling him, their mouths a pantomime, a dissonant music video, as he turns the mower and his back on them, the song turning to its bridge, the strange piano nearly silencing the lyrics he doesn’t yet understand but feels moving under his skin. He needs this, this moment, this darkness, alone, to dream himself away. They call to him, and I want to say, no, for now, let him be an X-Man on the Starjammer, soaring through Shiar space, let him have spandex bursting against three-color stars. Maybe tomorrow he’ll be a Power Ranger or a Ninja Turtle, in church he’ll grow a tail and blue fur and save the life of the girl, the cute one with the freckles just like his who asked for his help with fractions, who touched his arm and,$

7 10

Anthony Frame @anthonyframe.bsky.social · Jul 22

The brothers are together again. See you on the other side, Ozzy.

3