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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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Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 1d

K. Curtis Lyle

There is the SPIRIT
There is the SPIRIT
There is the SPIRIT
There is the SPIRIT

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Poetry Daily @poetrydaily.bsky.social · 1d

Today's Featured Poem:

"Chipping Sparrow" by Susan Howe published by Poetry Magazine

Read here:
poems.com/poem/chippin...

Chipping Sparrow

On the subject of assurance I should have I should have

poems.com

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Dina L. Relles @dinalrelles.bsky.social · 2d

it’s been a minute since i’ve published anything, so i’m especially grateful that @matchbooklitmag.bsky.social gave this little musing on love + leavings a home.

you can read the full piece here: matchbooklitmag.com/mb/relles/departures

Departures
by Dina L. Relles
handed you the promised coffee with an apology: no sugar, no milk, I’m sorry.

I don’t need those things, you said, and I fell in impossible love with you all over again.

I’d come from my room carrying everything I wanted to happen that didn’t. Now the lobby was too bright and smelled like grapefruits and your face was weary in a way that felt intimate.

You spoke quietly to me in the taxi, then held me twice at the terminal, which I took to mean you loved me too, despite.

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D. A. Powell @dapowell.bsky.social · 2d

Diana's Trees by Elizabeth Willis.

DIANA'S TREES

Silvery measures are being cut down, tricked by sun to slaughter.

My elm won't even let me break a sweat, something to believe by or just forget the dream, a fiery underlife, my score. My part becomes a piece of glass, a hand outside, against the one inside it. Make that ship you're thinking of a ship already, so I'll find it, in the water, in the sun.

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Alina Stefanescu @alinaetc.bsky.social · 3d

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself through me
from the self not mine but ours.

- A. R. Ammons, "Poetics"

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Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 3d

I thank the knife.

Jon Cone

AN ESSAY ON ONTOLOGICAL
PRAGMATISM

It is bitterly cold outside. The kitchen is cold. I thank the kettle. I thank the toaster. I thank the skillet. I thank the cutting board. I thank the knife. I thank the butter. I thank the water. I thank the raspberry jam. I thank the tea towel. I thank the coffee grounds I put into the compost tin. I thank the orange. I thank the orange peel. I thank the old round table. I thank the plate, the cup. The fork, the spoon. The small bowl of milk. The kitchen windows have ice. I must get window curtains. If you lean over the sink and look out the window at the far end of the street you see a pink aura announcing the sun’s arrival. I pick the cat's bowl up to clean it. I reach the cat food down from the cupboard. I thank the cat food and the cat bowl. The floor is dirty. It needs washing. I thank the floor.

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Jack Preston King @jackprestonking.bsky.social · 3d

A question for #writers, #Writing, #WritingCommunity, #WriteLife, #WriterLife, #Authors. I prefer to write in as close to total silence as possible. No music for me, and as little background noise as I can get. My question is, do you know of headphones or earbuds that can create silence?

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Chen Chen @chenchenwrites.bsky.social · 5d

When someone dies, we go searching for poetry.

But I want elegies while I’m still alive... I want ballads, I want ugly, grating sounds, I want repetition, I want white space... and even center-aligned italicized poems that rhyme, and most of all — feelings.

—Jenny Zhang

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Suzanne Frischkorn @suzfrischkorn.bsky.social · 5d

Happy to have a new poem in the gorgeous fall issue of North American Review! Many thanks to J.D Schraffenberger and the NAR team. This is a poem from a new manuscript I’ve been working on.
@northamerreview.bsky.social

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The Cincinnati Review @cincinnatireview.bsky.social · 6d

The 2025 winners of the Robert and Adele Schiff Awards are:

Robert Sorrell Bynum (fiction) for "Like a Star"
@jessicacuello.bsky.social (literary nonfiction) for "Your Life for Another"
A. D. Lauren-Abunassar (poetry) for "Three Bombardments"

See our site for more! Link in first comment.

Photos of the winners of the Schiff Awards under the heading "2025 Robert and Adele Schiff Award Winners." Each photo gets its own post page, to follow.

White text on a brick-red background: "Robert Sorrell Bynum, fiction, Robert and Adele Schiff Award winner." Photo is A white man with brown hair to his shoulders and tortoiseshell-frame glasses. He's wearing a black jean jacket over a puffer jacket and shirt, and he's standing on a beach in front of a body of water.

White text on a brick-red blackground: "Jessica Cuello, nonfiction, Robert and Adele Schiff Award winner." Photo is a black-and-white photo of a white woman with curly hair. she is wearing a dark sweater and light-colored shirt and sitting oustide.

White text on a black background: "A.D. Lauren-Abunassar, poetry, Robert and Adele Schiff Award winner." Photo is A Palestinian American woman with brown hair and hazel eyes. She's wearing a dark shirt, dangling earrings, and a necklace chain, and standing in front of a white window shade.

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Litbowl @litbowl.bsky.social · 3d

Absolutely love that final phrase.

From @kathyfagan.bsky.social's book, Bad Hobby: bookshop.org/a/862/9781571315458

#poetry #books #writing

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Amorak Huey @amorak.bsky.social · 4d

Jenny George—

Fortune
Autumn, with its vivid exchanges,
streams the avenues
of an old city. The falling leaves
produce a kind of wedding.
There's a thinness to the air.
Golden cottonwoods tremble with their visions.

We walk along the street
with our shoulders nearly
touching. One of us
carries a bag of delicate pastries
wrapped in paper like sticky jewels.

Here, says the Future, that famous comic.
Here are your lives. They are yours
to live in extravagantly.

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Susan Robertson @snullr.bsky.social · 3d

For @tomsnarsky.bsky.social 's #smallpoemsunday one from @roblucastaylor.bsky.social 's Weather.

A three line poem that reads

screen door--
one hundred sunrises
in the baby's palm

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Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 3d

Cleaning is sometimes the closest thing I have to a spiritual cleanse / practice / zealotry / descent of the spirit 🕊️

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Solivagant @wanderingsag.bsky.social · 3d

~ e. e. cummings

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Burgi Zenhaeusern @burgi.bsky.social · 3d

An October haiku from way back for #smallPoemSunday, published by UCity Review (also way back).
The weather is as clear today as when I wrote this.

October Sun

Glitter and sharpness
sever sky from crowns today.
No dulling the edge.

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 4d

Thank you! 💙

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Alison Birch @irishali13.bsky.social · 4d

This poem is stunning. If you haven't read Dressing The Bear, it's a must-read.
Clean
~ Susan L. Leary
-I often worried when I got the call, I'd be unprepared. But the morning my brother dies ——💙

Clean
By: Susan L. Leary
I often worried when I got the call, I'd be unprepared.
But the morning my brother dies, all the good clothes in the house are clean. So I tell myself to get on with it. x later, standing over my brother,
I think whoever
prepared his body must love what they do. Because he looks so clean. Cleaner, even, than when he'd doze on the couch midafternoons to Hank Williams or Johnny Cash.
The fatigue of living wiped from his cheeks. & today, as then, the same stillness stretched across his eyes.
The same tiny shovels for thumbs. & when I find the strength to rest a hand atop his, I shake him a little to tell him I wore his favorite dress: summery & sand-colored with splotches of blue. & while it seems so symbolic, it's all rather simple.
I wear a blue-patterned dress because my brother loved the ocean. & because my brother was lonely & broken, he couldn't kick drugs. But I love my brother & the morning he dies, all the good clothes in the house are clean.
So I tell him: Clean.

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 4d

I love each time this poem is shared. Thank you for that gift today, Alison, and for all the love you continue to show DRESSING THE BEAR (@triohousepress.org). 💙🙏

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Susan L. Leary @susanlleary.bsky.social · 4d

Beautiful!!!!

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Rebecca Hart Olander @rholanderpoet.bsky.social · 6d

So happy to share the cover of SINGING FROM THE DEEP END, coming from CavanKerry Press 2/3/26! Singing praises & gratitude to the @cavankerrypress.bsky.social team for making this book with me in such a beautiful way. 20% off till 11/2 (link in bio). Deep ♥️ & thanks to all who support/ed this book.

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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 4d

A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

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Claude Monet @monet.bsky.social · 4d

Clematis - 1887
https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/10677

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Evan Kuhlman @moonbasewolfy.bsky.social · 9d

From the poem "Work" by Mary Oliver. #poetry #grief

A snippet of a long poem by Mary Oliver titled "Work."

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