Veronika Fuchs
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veronikafuchs.bsky.social
Veronika Fuchs
@veronikafuchs.bsky.social
190 followers 160 following 380 posts
Writer. Mama. Dreamer. Occasional painter.
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Reposted by Veronika Fuchs
susanlleary.bsky.social
M. Cynthia Cheung ♥️

from COMMON DISASTER (Acre Books)

I absolutely love this poem!

@acrebooks.bsky.social
Still Life The backyard foxes are lean this winter, and the birds bright. Most days I can't bring myself to do anything but watch the vixen root for something. A run of good days means I'll spend hours rearranging the pantry, as if preparing to paint a Dutch still life. All that's missing is a milkmaid. Or a dead bird. My dress, wrinkled and sleeveless, is nothing like the sky. The foxes grow thinner, and I wonder whether I should feed them, though I don't really know what they eat. Nights stretch and I sleep little, but it's the days, the sun at four o'clock, that are the most difficult-when the movement of clouds appears full of peril. People once drilled holes into other people's skulls, just to let that darkness out.
November 9, 2025 at 5:46 AM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
And yet even that is possible: to have the starred skies closely wrapped around one's heart.

Rilke, in a letter to Ilse Erdmann, October 1915
Text: I remember Rodin's exasperation when Francis Jammes repeated Van Tieghem's claim that the seeds of certain flowers had arrived on earth from other stars, trapped inside meteorites. Rodin knew how much we have yet to accomplish here (indeed, what not?!) and very decidedly did not want our curiosity turned beyond and away from what is here. And yet even that is possible: to have the starred skies closely wrapped around one's heart.
November 9, 2025 at 6:23 AM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
She was watching
Picture of a full moon with a halo of light around it. Looks like a pupil with an iris. Silhouettes of trees against a blurred background.
November 6, 2025 at 4:38 PM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
November, and I'm leafing through Mary Frances's @maryfrancesness.bsky.social LANDFALL again...

www.metambesen.org/wp-content/u...
November 3, 2025 at 6:05 PM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
Stories (and histories) on the surface of Virginia Woolf's writing desk, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, 2010
The wooden surface of the desk, stained with ink and paint, and other marks of use and time
November 3, 2025 at 4:36 PM
Reposted by Veronika Fuchs
chowleen.bsky.social
“It is also November. The noons are more laconic and the sundowns sterner...November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”

-Emily Dickinson, letter to Elizabeth Holland (Nov 1865)
#everynightapoem #november
"Whom seeing not, we" clasp - Emily A remnant of a letter to Elizabeth Holland, in the Amherst Emily Dickinson Collection
November 3, 2025 at 2:19 AM
Reposted by Veronika Fuchs
andrewbertaina.bsky.social
“People really understand very little of one another…My Cid looks very hard and straight into my face as if in search of something..like someone who has tumbled off a star. But he is not the one who feel alien—…I think. He lives in a small country of hope, which is his heart.”

Anne Carson
October 31, 2025 at 12:50 PM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
Fall
Watercolor painting: autumn trees with yellow, orange, brown, and a few green leaves against a blue sky, seen as if from below
October 31, 2025 at 4:24 PM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
"In Syros, you struggled to separate your fantasy of Greece from the Greece around you. Pink dawns, laundry on balconies, and exhaust fumes wrestled with Styx, Lethe, coins on cold tongues."

"strangeness is the true hallmark of beauty, not symmetry," —a beautiful new piece by David Luntz
October 30, 2025 at 6:08 PM
Reposted by Veronika Fuchs
susanlleary.bsky.social
Joanna Klink ♥️
Elegy BY JOANNA KLINK I saw you fall to the ground. I saw the oaks fall. The clouds collapsed. I saw a wildness twist through your limbs and fly off. The river fell, the grasses fell. The backs of six drowned cattle rose to the surface ice-nothing moved. But a wind touched my ankles when the snow began. You left that night and we stayed, our arms braced with weight. What power there was was over. But I switched on the light by the porch to see if anything was falling-and it fell, a few glints in the air, catching sun although there was no sun, and the long descent over hours, all night, seemed like years, and we buried our faces in what came to rest on the ground or moved our feet over it, effortless, as nothing was in our lives, or ever will be.
October 25, 2025 at 10:36 PM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
Speaking of Rilke, autumns, and paintings (and of Rilke's angels and our desperate moments under black suns), years ago I painted "Rilke's Autumn" and destroyed it shortly afterward.
Abstract painting: mostly vertical brushstrokes in shades of dark green, brown, and black. In the center, "something" resembling burning angel wings, casting light around them
October 26, 2025 at 6:06 PM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
An autumn day spent with paintings. It is no surprise that Rilke's words arrived with the night.

"At no other time ...does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; …Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost,"

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne
Text: Never have I been so touched and almost gripped by the sight of heather as the other day, when I found these three branches in your dear letter. Since then they are lying in my Book of Images, penetrating it with their strong and serious smell, which is really just the fragrance of autumn earth. But how glorious it is, this fragrance. At no other time, it seems to me, does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more than honeysweet where you feel it is close to touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost, and yet again wind; tar and turpentine and Ceylon tea. Serious and poor like the smell of a begging monk and yet again hearty and resinous like precious incense. And the way ...
October 26, 2025 at 6:51 AM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
"Peter Schmidt uses the “strikethrough” as a kind of shadow-writing: his “Encyclopedia of Light” reveals little dark threads of undoing — marks of the second thought that endlessly cancels the first."

A beautiful read with paintings by Joseph Mallord William Turner.
publicdomainrev.bsky.social The Public Domain Review @publicdomainrev.bsky.social · 16d
From our Conjectures series... Peter Schmidt's “Encyclopedia of Light”, an affecting work of sensory history... https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-encyclopedia-of-light
October 25, 2025 at 6:13 PM
Reposted by Veronika Fuchs
hanvanderhart.bsky.social
exhausted and iambic

Richard Siken
LINE Orpheus descended. The red ribbon unspooled from his mouth in the darkness. He sang and it fluttered. There were sisters somewhere. They spun, they measured, and they cut but the song continued. A word rings like a struck bell. It ends when it stops ringing. When does a line end? How long is a piece of string? A line ends when it is broken. Theseus descended. He rounded the corners and grazed the margins. He kept going. You can name a tree and tether your tale to the yard. You can enter the labyrinth and pull yourself out with a rope. Theseus killed the Minotaur. According to some, he used his hands. Others say he used a sword. How long is a piece of string? How long is a story or a song? Theseus spooling. A sentence ends with a period but a line continues on. I wouldn't break the line. I was afraid to. Too much was already broken. I lashed the words like pack dogs, each to each, and sledded the frozen lands for yards. I told myself the story of myself. It bounced back. It echoed in the maze and I triangulated. You think the monster is the problem. The problem is the thread. The sentence goes one way, the line goes another. It makes a friction. Dawn breaks. The waves break against the cliffs. A necklace breaks and the opals scatter like rats. You can break a promise, you can break a glass, you can draw a line in the sand or throw a ball of yarn at a kitten yelling Minotaur! Measure measure, cut cut. The sauce breaks. Your heart breaks. The car breaks down by the side of the road and you end up walking home in the dark, exhausted and iambic. I didn't want to risk it. from I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon, 2025)
October 25, 2025 at 1:38 AM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
I was looking for Bonnard's painting mentioned in Marguerite Duras's "Practicalities" ("Bonnard") and, of course, the path led me further, to Édouard Vuillard, whose yellows and greens I adore today.
Édouard Vuillard The Flowered Dress (La robe à ramages), 1891 Oil on canvas Édouard Vuillard Guelder Roses and the Venus of Milo (Rose guelder e la Venere di Milo), 1905 Oil on cardboard Édouard Vuillard Madame Hessel At The Milliner (Madame Hessel Chez La Modiste), 1903 Oil on board Édouard Vuillard Man and Woman beneath a Tree (Homme et femme sous un arbre), 1893 Oil on board
October 25, 2025 at 3:35 PM
Reposted by Veronika Fuchs
907life.bsky.social
Autumn light

#icm #impressionism #landscapelovers #photography
October 21, 2025 at 2:45 PM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
Robert Schumann by Mary Oliver 🖤
Text: Robert Schumann Hardly a day passes I don't think of him in the asylum: younger than I am now, trudging the long road down through madness toward death. Everywhere in this world his music explodes out of itself, as he could not.  And now I understand something so frightening, and wonderful — how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing through crossroads, sticking like lint to the familiar. So!  Hardly a day passes I don't think of him: nineteen, say, and it is spring in Germany and he has just met a girl named Clara.  He turns the corner, he scrapes the dirt from his soles, he runs up the dark staircase, humming.
October 21, 2025 at 6:14 PM
Reposted by Veronika Fuchs
sanctorium.bsky.social
How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time.

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo; tr. Michael Hulse
October 19, 2025 at 2:25 PM
Reposted by Veronika Fuchs
willmusgrove.bsky.social
I have a new micro about a random fear in the latest issue of @asteralesjournal.bsky.social Check it out if you wanna but make sure you read all the other amazing writers in the issue. 💙

Link: www.asteralesjournal.com/1-4-musgrove...
Issue four of Asterales.
October 20, 2025 at 3:09 PM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
My sister is visiting for the first time in three years. Of course, we went to the orchard to pick apples. She asked, "Does it feel like homeplace yet?" All night long, I dreamed about jars of grandmother's apple jam.
An apple orchard with apples on the trees and on the ground A hand holding an apple hanging from a tree
October 20, 2025 at 5:39 PM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
Today's poem (Daily Poem) from The Paris Review. ❤️
Text: Linda Gregg Part of Me Wanting Everything to Live This New England kind of love reminds me of the potted chrysanthemum my husband gave me. I cared for it faithfully, turning the pot a quarter turn each day as it sat by the window until the blossoms hung with broken necks on the dry stems. Cut off the dead parts and watched green leaves begin, new buds open. Thinking the chrysanthemum would not die unless I forced it to. The new flowers were smaller and smaller, resembling little eyes awake and alone in the dark. I was offended by the lessening, by the cheap renewal. By a going on that gradually left the important behind. But now it’s different. I want the large and near, and endings more final. If it must be winter, let it be absolutely winter.
October 17, 2025 at 5:01 PM
veronikafuchs.bsky.social
Heart-shaped yarrow
October 17, 2025 at 4:49 PM
Reposted by Veronika Fuchs
dreamsofbeing.bsky.social
Yves Bonnefoy; tr. Beverly Bie Brahic
Our Hands in the Water We stir the water. Our hands seek each other, Sometimes they touch, broken forms. Deeper down, a current: some of the invisible, Other trees, other lights, other dreams. And see, there are even other colours. Refraction transfigures the red. Was it a summer day, no, this is the storm That will 'change the sky, until evening. We thrust our hands into language, They took some words we didn't know What to do with, being only our desires. We grew old. This water, our hope. Others will know how to look deeper For a new sky, a new earth.
October 16, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Reposted by Veronika Fuchs
susanlleary.bsky.social
New poem in Cream City Review alongside the work of so many extraordinary talents! I’m super excited by this one, which is also forthcoming in my collection, MORE FLOWERS, out with Trio House Press in February 2026! 💙💜

@creamcityreview.bsky.social
@triohousepress.org
Susan L. Leary At First, Obedience, Subsequently— Defiance. The wound, begging for attention: its half heart beating beneath a lace doily while the ugliness explodes to the surface. Why disrupt this flourish of peace, this little tomb of white space? She looks good, they'd said. Brave inside unworkable conditions. Dead or alive, we make an anniversary of our sorrow, expeditious with our buckets of spring. To what do we owe the pleasure? You fabricate worlds in dreams while a girl fabricates worlds on the page. This is what is meant by ritual. When we say, the pedigree of the mouth-body is good. There's no use determining for whom our company is intended. Every gesture is dangerous. Were I to cut my ear off, I'd give it to you. An image of the front cover of Cream City Review.
October 16, 2025 at 9:57 PM
Reposted by Veronika Fuchs
alinaetc.bsky.social
And you can never, ever find words for it.

- Marguerite Duras, "Bonnard" (t. by Barbara Bray)
October 15, 2025 at 6:56 PM