Poem text
"in memoriam, John Berryman". This is the closing poem of a sequence I started writing a little over a month ago, called MAYFLOWER TABLE. (Hopefully to be a chapbook soon.)
No worries at all. Watching is participation at this stage. Glad you’re following along.
A quick update on The Poetry Thing:
Our first small trial taught us some important things about the mechanics.
Rather than force it, we’re taking a step back to build this properly.
We’ll be back soon with something stronger. In the meantime, I’ll be reading!
George Saunders Says Ditching These Three Delusions Can Save You www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/m...
A very good morning my #PromptCombo darlings! We have reached the halfway point of my hosting duties.
Here's a recording of me reading my poem 'Unforgettable Beauty that is #Nightfall'
Thanks @thepaulconnolly.bsky.social , for this tip on this method of recording 😉
Big ♥️ Love Everyone.
“O Holy Mother of Moths, brighten the light
that fills the scene where I fall.”
A poem by Mary Jo Bang. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago”--Friedrich Nietzsche
#poetry #poetrycommunity
#writing #writercommunity
#mpprompt
#Strength
#Thoughts
@malformed-poetry.bsky.social
@blueskypoetry.bsky.social
🌙 #poem #blueskypoetry #poetrysky #poetrycommunity #poet #Blacksky #writingcommunity
Another one for #emoetry #heartbroken. It's coming up on a tragic anniversary in our home and #grief emerges in many forms. I can't look at this piece again long enough to screenshot it. I may have cried writing a bit. Anyway, hugs all around 🤗
#poem #poetry
poetry-with-hart.online/2026/01/05/t...
Cold dark and wide awake
I stare at the shut door
In front of me, a black void
Into which my memories
Have fallen
Away from laughter
Away from sorrow
Memories
Laughing in the dark
#ও☉❢☉✑
#poetry
#writing
#micropoetry
#blueskywriters
#writingcommunity
The wolf moon in the crisp of winter’s night ice-cracked star-studded I took my chances on a girl beyond my means walked you home down lanes and alleys through seasons across continents again the wolf moon rises nightfall returns and you you are gone
Thanks @dragonslayerma.bsky.social for the first #promptcombo of the year - #nightfall is a great choice. Bit slow getting up to working speed today but here's a quick poem to wish everyone a happy new year #poetry #poems
One more thing.
I’m not a poet.
This isn’t me trying to fix poetry or speak for poets. It’s me trying to build a small, transparent experiment and iterate week by week until it’s genuinely useful for poets, and eventually for readers too.
The core idea hasn’t changed.
Poetry gets written more than it gets read.
The Poetry Thing is an attempt to design a structure where reading is the point, not an afterthought, and where poets are the first audience.
Week 1 did not get enough submissions to make the loop work yet.
That’s on us.
We’re extending the deadline to next Saturday and removing the entry fee for now while we keep building this into something genuinely useful.
Submit here:
👉https://airtable.com/appsXqILiOKLGjYV7/pagtFBu183670GuY3/form
#poem #poets #blueskypoets #poetry #writing #writingcommunity #poetrycommunity
This one is for the artists, which is many of you.
I do so appreciate so many of you artists on BlueSky. In so many ways, it's the artists who hold humanity together. Stay in tune to the mysteries of life, each & everyone of you.
#Poetry #Mystery #EastCoastKin #Poem
‘Remember spring my love, hold tight with me’ 💚
The snowdrops lift lime-green lined umbrellas’
@suefinch.bsky.social from our Christmas-winter anthology.
www.blackboughpoetry.com/news
My rescheduled #poetry reading at the Newtown Bookshop is Wednesday evening Jan 28. newtownbookshop.com/event/2026-0...
‘Two headless snowmen— glove-craft: sculpted stone and swan-ice’ ⛄️ ⛄️ 🪓
@vespertine4.bsky.social from our Christmas-Winter anthology. 🦢 🧊
blackboughpoetry.com/news
• Entry fee exists to make the read/judge loop real
• Fees go to the weekly prize + basic ops
• No formal dispute process yet (Week 1 is manual)
• Trust & safety is enforced via assignments + human review, not policy docs
We’ll formalize policies once patterns emerge.
Fair questions—thanks for raising them.
Short answers for Week 1 below 👇
(This is intentionally small + experimental.)
Week 1 submissions are open.
• Submit one poem
• Read peer poems
• Judge them thoughtfully
That judgment matters.
Submissions close tonight (Sat, Jan 3).
👉 Submit here: airtable.com/appsXqILiOKL...
Your poem.
Your judgment.
when B-roads leave small towns I follow with anticipation as they shake off doors and chimneys, double yellow lines, and plunge into a greener possibility of hedgerows, meadows, valleys, woods, swap pigeons for red kites and kestrels, cats for fallow deer and foxes, and pedestrians for walkers. what villages and hamlets lie down there? what isolated farms and run-down saddleries? the B-road tugs me from mundanity to something magical — from fact to hope. the off-side wheels an inch away from where cow parsley hides the drop – vertiginous – down to the Glyme, and through the open on-side windows we could pick the delicately arching bluebells (though of course we…
"Minor Roads".
#poem #poetry #skypoets #blueskypoets #poetsofbluesky #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity
Why The Poetry Thing exists
Poetry gets written more than it gets read.
The Poetry Thing is a weekly experiment:
if you submit a poem, you also read poems.
Week 1 opens tomorrow.
Failing and Flying Jack Gilbert, 1925-2012 Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It's the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
-Jack Gilbert
#Poetry 💙📚👀
Unsolicited writing advice, no. 780:
Don't ask yourself if you used the right words. Ask what you made the reader feel.
We’re launching a weekly poetry contest soon.
Poets submit one poem.
Poets read and judge one another.
Judgment is the point.
This is really moving. The way shared watching becomes a pocket of happiness feels so true. Thank you for sharing it.
The Pine Dresser Dismantling the pine dresser (put up in ’74), I am stuck on a last warped hinge. A lone bolt writhes like a maggot, burrowing deep, holding onto the shelving for never used plates, when my father’s cusses return again. Back then, a brace of strangers delivered the jaundiced wood in two parts: the younger leading but unspeaking, the other cigarette bobbing, brusquely bossing, and me being ushered away while my father strained and swore, breaking the likely same askew fastening. So now I connect once more, my struggle to reverse, to undo. Each laboured half-turn back, along the gnaw of a crooked path, refinds the thread of an afternoon’s strain, preserved so unexpectedly, in the unforgiving amber grain.
Hullo #vss365 and to #struggle An old one today…
Tricks by D.A. Powell from CutBank Books. Cover image by Paul Wonner. http://www.cutbankonline.org/2026-chapbooks
What an incredible surprise! This chapbook is officially out next month but apparently it's available already at www.cutbankonline.org/2026-chapbooks
Thanks to the fabulous editors at CutBank books for being so stellar at every point along the way.
