allyn 🌎

The current submission window for fiction, poetry, and essays will close on December 15th.

✍️

In Kind by Maggie Queeney was 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Federal agents violently detained a food delivery driver as he emerged from a D.C. coffee shop Saturday morning.

The incident captured on video showed the officers throwing him to the ground and beating him before sweeping him away in an unmarked vehicle. wapo.st/45Egtkc

Terrance Hayes is a poet who I won’t read for years & when I come back to him, his poems, form, & craft inspire me like I’m reading him for the first time again & again & again.

I totally love how we get ads in our email boxes now. Amazing. Top notch. Couldn’t be better.

So Many Amendments Should Have Already Been Made To Our Constitution….

I just found out R.L. Stine is a Libra & for some reason that surprised me.

Male Costa’s Hummingbird

Parting shot of this rock star from last week… Costa’s Hummingbird on cholla skeleton 🪶☀️🌵 (sunrise reflection in bird’s eye)

Dear Poetry & Writing Gods,
Please send me an acceptance as an AWP panelist.
And one (or both) of my chapbooks winning a contest.
And some new pubs from the journals I’ve been submitting to.
Ever Your Humble Servant,
Allyn

I will never not call Thor’s hammer, “Mewmew.”

Shower Thot:

I was thinking about the phrase “candid or plandid” & was like, “wth does plandid even mean?”

I thought about it more and decided it must be a pun (?) for “planned it.”

never really thought about that phrase until this morning, but I will say “planned it” is a better slant.

I’m just throwing this out there, but maybe all of us should get Paramount+ solely to watch South Park. 🤷🏻‍♀️

In an Age of Climate Change, How Do We Cope with Floods? The deaths in the Texas Hill Country are a tragic testament to the force of a raging river. Flood-stricken Vermont has a radical plan to counter the threat it faces.

A recent national study concluded that floods previously considered to be hundred-year events have become, on average, 62-year events, as a result of human-caused climate change.

No matter how many times I see it (multiple at this point), every time Rengoku dies, I sob. #demonslayer

This week’s reading list contains:
The Last Song of the World -Fasano
From The New World -Graham
Kingdom Animalia -Girmay
Ars Poetica -Spahr
Tripas -Som
The World is Round -Finney
Structure & Surprise -Ed. By Theune
The Art of the Poetic Line -Longenbach
Dark Ecology -Morton

I never thought I’d truly get tired of typing (it’s not that hard when just typing information from one document to another), but here we are. #examnotes #phdlife

Potentially unpopular opinion: I think women’s swimwear styles have gone downhill.

Practical Poetics: Part 1 YouTube video by Allyn Bernkopf

Starting a YouTube series for my exam readings. Follow along if you’d like. 🥰

Practical Poetics: Part 1
youtu.be/9Jub4QLS9qg

If you haven’t ever looked into Eastern body tapping, highly recommend. I’ve never felt anxiety leave my body so quickly. 😍

An Oscillation Between Extreme Achievement & Excessive Loneliness: A PhD Narrative

Isn’t it strange how a PhD is just as much about mental & emotional resilience as it is about learning the stuff & becoming an expert? 😜 T-3 months ‘til I’m ABD. 😮‍💨✋🏻 If you need a cheerleader, hit me up. 🥳

💀

I am blown away by Go Figure by Rae Armantrout. Wow. Just wow.

A Fortune For Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib is absolutely your next must-read.

When an American Town Massacred Its Chinese Immigrants In 1885, white rioters murdered dozens of their Asian neighbors in Rock Springs, Wyoming. A hundred and forty years later, the story of the atrocity is still being unearthed.

In 1885, white rioters murdered dozens of Chinese residents of Rock Springs, Wyoming. The story of the atrocity is still being unearthed 140 years later.

Love that I’m watching the Joplin, Missouri tornado documentary & about halfway through, the weather outside my house thunders. I definitely jumped.

An Oklahoma morning. ☕️ 🪴

Saying goodbye to a species, moments before the last male northern white rhino on the planet passed away.

-Credits: Ami Vitale

If anyone needs a pick-me-up, here’s a photo of a Silkie.