Hi all- I just posted on my Substack site today about everyone’s amazing and brilliant April poems and the thrilling idyll of the month. Tending embers. Hopefully links will work for a minute till the drafts disappear- if anyone prefer temporary words to vanish in the article too just ping me. Love you all, friends.
Tag: Napowrimo 2026
SEX ADVICE FROM HIPPIES
Mental toolkits are the color of brown paper bags
I’ve never sued anyone! she said at the party
I’ve never pulled a tick off my dog’s butt!
I pulled one off my husband’s butt!
I squeezed into a dumbwaiter and got stuck!
Why do they stand around
passing out candy and screens to children
wondering what real power is
and why students can’t sit still
The saddest part about summer is summer
I could tell she lost empathy when she said she didn’t care
I know exactly the motivations of my son’s bully
Reaching for a balloon the same thing as reaching for oblivion
So charged by the new freshness we voted for it
This wet towel is so moldy it can speak
Poets define sameness generation after generation
Sometimes there’s little evidence you’ve been bitten by a bat
Truthcraft
Were revelations velled
You could have un-velled them
To dance the seven
With your head on a plate
Tongueburger
Satiated apricot
The joke in poems
Is pronunciation
Elocution probe
Moon’s moon
The neutrals have won
A little channel runnels
Down flatland
Through the marsh
Skyly
Stroked by the feather
Heart-ear
Swallow your pilgrim pill
On pilot’s checklist:
STAY ALIVE
Dignity, always,
Dignity
Magellan flagella
Muriatic blurb
I assure you
Says the crocodile
Rude with mouth full
These tears are mine to give
Clocks never say midnight only 12
Dring droses ring bells
Stow the bleachers fold the dais
Ribbon the scrolls
Nothing is permanent
Just very very long
SMALL BATCHES
If you stare at a spreadsheet long enough
it will come alive
and turn into colors that must be fed with yeast in little bowls
Picking her up by the corset is the same thing as licking my brain
He can’t change anyone but he still has no friends
Beep beep red warning with no one near me on the open road
Don’t get hit by a car is really good advice
A sleeping woman is only the color of her hair
Nothing showed up on the x-ray
His real toe hovered around the bone
like a screen door to the afterlife
Why didn’t I write everything he said down
What would you do with all these tuition dollars
At a certain age freedom becomes a new kind of work
lifting your heavy body on the rings at the playground
At least we’re not in seventh grade anymore
Er
From Pamphylia
Land of tongues
The sounds words make
Is not their fault
They can’t help it
Being spoken
Feels like speaking to
The language
Undertrawler
Inxile
Returning already
From where you were going
Er ero
Sheer eroist
Are you telling how or
Must and
Would will
To the future
Er
Ess
Listen
The present
Is telling
Every
Wherever
Of the where
BEST NOT TO DWELL BUT DWELL DEEPLY
I only write so I can say nothing is finished
I’ll start typing and publishing books
as soon as I’m done reading everything
Your own book is the only one you don’t read
I want to get lost in her life
all of her family’s lucky occurrences
She never touched the ground because she was carried
by her mother who sold her own shoes
Leave or die
Understand this one corner
could you the whole
Why should we care about the old country anyway
History only reveals resilience because of historical ambition
Love is don’t do to me what you did to her
The slow burn of a face
I always feel odd when having my picture taken
as though I never get captured
or am trapped
Who among
Abouties and
Aroundnesses
Live limbs
Reach back to touch
Your face
Gently measuring
Threadlineage
Anyoneymous
Wing flock
Are you speaking or breathing
Asleep
The furies trill
Half-flying
Half-roosting
Portmanteaucrat
Juridical octopus screes
Talon tentacled
The ink slow clouds
If there were terraces
Ever on the bluffs
Now hillsides of boulder dust
Wilderness farms
Chaossifications
Earless and listening
Along the islands float
Around the zephyrs blows
The oceans smell
Like seas of sea
FIRESTAR LEADER OF THUNDERCLAN
Cursing and swearing is the cool language of cake
and chinos with loafers and no socks
They left the centibillionaire’s island
with hand-foot-and-mouth disease and a broken ankle
all of which he could afford
When it is my turn to speak I will say I should sell sneakers or Bibles or real estate
It’s laziness that prevents me from making real money
It won’t matter anyway
because soon we’ll be part of the centibillionaire’s soul
stuck in a prism like the bad guys in Superman 2
Where in your body do you think you laugh first
in your wealthiest part
The best kind of distraction is bodily distraction which is focus
A 30 minute lunch
This is very rough and it got weird at the end but this is where my brain went on my 30 minute lunch.
I am crashing towards the end
And it’s another Monday & I feel
Near collapse. The sky is blue again
And the clouds call for rain and
I am staring at the space between
Wondering where to begin and
End. Where the girls are
And where shifts happen in real
Time not imaginative wanderings
That steal the tiny bits of dreams
My fingers don’t want to type and my back
And hip ache – every morning waking
Into pain and they tell me it’s ok
Keep going keep going and well
It’s not and I won’t and I will rest
And rest long and fulfilled rest like
Those deer in an idyllic field like
A yellowed field but pretty and serene
Like it should be
All these days pass and I forget
Words and how to write and
How to be human – whatever
Truly – what whatever that means
and when waking into a world
Sets the constant tripping on fire
And burns the itty bits of flesh from
My long long exhausted nervous system
And it’s really the fading that’s causing
The lack of color and you know,
That part where the skin turns gray
And there are tears of your own and
And an orange flower alights like
The sun and you curl up like a
Shrimp to sleep – that there can be
A little dream that we touch on
Pour some sauce on me, I’m cooked
And looking for another mouth
To feed.
The meadow
I bless every sneezer
Bless the sneezer
Not the sneeze
The plough of ploems
Meandering over here
While youander over there
In doom pollen yonders
Pretty good right
Like the pretty wildflowers
The pretty bees prettify
On their way
To where the pretty dance
Told them to fly
The art for art’s sake
Balloon animals
Popped by balloon needles
Saked for sake’s sake
Pastoral, presentoral
Good morning
Sings the morning
The only song it knows
Dr JKL and Mr MNOP
Have you on a hilltop
Released a bicycle
The big wheel
In the front
Eventually becoming
The same size
As the little one behind
Staying upright
So long as it’s in motion
How long is that
Let us agree
On tools
Of equal measure
The love you feel
Expressed grammatically
With only intuitive syntax
Only the minimum alphabet
To take up space
Your body already
Holds itself around
Bride of the day
Temporarily occupying
The circumstance
Turning around yourself
Inside yourself
Like a top
That keeps spinning
Holding itself up
A top with no bottom
Or a box of all sides
How would you know
If you open the box
On all the sides
It isn’t a box anymore
But you
Are still you
A series barely
Or a sequence almost
Collapsing nowhere
You don’t already
Hold yourself
Up against
To what
To tall enough
To board the ride
To see over the bar
Vertical horizon
Look at you
Not knowing this
Is how you look
Lookable
Uprighted
Look what
Goes up
How far it goes
Endodox
To hold
the anti
of the thing
against the thing
to make it purple
in the red light
your insides
cherish
So easy
to smash
the little thing
to see the anti
to raise your hand
and move at it
the waterfall
and your torso
already wet
from the mist
every object
sprays off itself
Nothing
doesn’t choose
The skin
that touches skin
then presses
till skin gives way
membranes pop
and the words
smear
ink around
Is orthodox
the opposite
of paradox?
A pair of ducks
they say
like any two ducks
in the skein
can be paired off
V
Duck 1: I’d rather not
Duck 2: But I’d rather
Don’t my rathers matter?
You’re using
language
too much
the poet says
try something else
A colorist pales
violences
of ultraviolet
Doxy doxa
dog whistles sonata
heat death alive
the ant-
i wash away
This notapoem
is a recipe for
words a poem
package comes in
Masquerades
in tin, fur
query or inquiry
then sponse
Spectra
for every letter
in order
one at a time
yes no materials
All at once or
once and for all
A ray B ray C ray
D ray E ray F ray G
ray H ray I
et cetera
endless et
And then?
Empathies
empathied
every last one
Fear of
Spick and span
Or one or the other
But not both
Venn diagram
Of what is diagrammatical
And what is not
The marks on your body
Descend into your body
Skin neverending
Erasures reinscribed
A system
That monetizes money
Gawks at free things
Freedom to think
To say what will be done
And witness the doing
Safe
Beyond the shock front
The present provides
From longer spans
The left tense
And the right
The revenants
And the reverents
Take your hand into
Your other hand
Where it joins
Other others
In a slurry of
Galaxyzygy
Eclipse songs
Subtle mud
That leaves a mud smell
Everywhere it touches
Even the world
After you
Wash the world away
Gentle
Scrape my freckle
With your fingernail
EAT WITH OUR HANDS
There’s nothing better than a book that smells like a white bra
or a string of mustard
All of our books have wet or dry food on them
Why aren’t there dining tables with shelves
Did Proust change me or did time go by
I assume a rule
hard work will be rewarded
Why compulsory sports
not compulsory daily poetry writing
You can’t put a book down like that
it’ll hurt the spine or the dog will eat it
A coyote visits my yard because she likes my books
and is okay with loneliness and fear
She underlines me with her eyes
If we’re all poets when we dream she says
we’re all filmmakers when we daydream
MEAT MAKES ME GASSY
What’s up
I hate it when you ask me that
What are you doing
Can’t you tell I’m reading
What are you reading
A book about the history of books
What are you doing
Reading a book about bookstore owners
Does it include you
I haven’t found myself yet
I read today that we love art and art loves us
Is that what John said to David
Does art love us
No but art keeps it all together
Yes he does
Do you write before or after going to the gym
I don’t go to the gym I don’t want to workout in front of anyone
I don’t mind it I always end up reading anyway
You never go anywhere without ten books
Best to be prepared
It’s impossible to write before working out it’s like breathing without blood flow
To lift weights gets you going then
No it’s like a physical purge
With kettle bells
Sometimes
Noncom
The you of which you speak
Gleans yous in the yousland
There are so many
Mouse hair sweaters
On cough owl chairs
Vaultchested, cantalouped
The gnashmash reconfigures
New word comes next
Getting larger as it goes away
To remain always the same size
If you hunger for your hungers
Baby bird, will you take worms from any worm giver
If the worms themselves approach
Will you pluck or wait for the gift
Baroque specific tooth sayer
Lines shake out your sorrows
Tremors tremulously tremble
OR or OR
Which have you chosen
Which will you choose