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Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

New office pets!

Tarantula in a tarantula pen with a sign behind that says "Bee happy"

Tarantula in a tarantula pen with a sign behind that says "Bee"

October 28, 2025 at 1:28 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

OMG! Thanks @djvorreyer.bsky.social & Rachel Bunting for incl my poem, "Reading @rosebudbenoni.bsky.social's Turn Around, BRXGHT XYXS" While Listening to Tori Amos' Cover of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" During the Total Solar Eclipse" in the new @asteralesjournal.bsky.social!

tinyurl.com/23fn5cp6

Reading Rosebud Ben-Oni’s Turn Around, BRXGHT XYXS While Listening to Tori Amos’ Cover of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” During the Total Solar Eclipse

Anthony Frame

- for Chris Cornell

I understand, sun: every now and then, I want to disappear, too.

I’m determined to hear the birds, the soft bellows of their throats
anchoring this moment. Lost and long, I steal this day with my wife,

holding hands as we stumble along the unfinished path through

the garden. We’re told not to look directly so we look at each other
or we close our eyes and listen, sunrays washing our arms.

There’s a part of me that wants to blast “Black Hole Sun”

on the record player but she says, “Be here with me.” But I’m not,
I’m thirteen, singing in the shower, thinking about supernovas.

The moon is on the move, shadows starting to startle the birds.

As the garden starts to silence, I think, Is this what it’s like to hear
a god? I want to scream like a star exploding, but instead I sit

and hold my wife’s hand and wait. Perhaps, we need a new cosmology,

a new language, a new sequence of mysteries. As a child, I wanted
to disappear, to separate into droplets of air, rinsed clean and clear.

Sometimes, I’ve wanted to shatter so bright my light would reach

the edges of the galaxy. The sun seems to dissolve behind the moon
and the silence covers us but it lasts just under two minutes and then,

like a birth, the birds start singing again. Every now and then,

I’ve wanted my voice to rise so high it might achieve escape velocity.
I start to hum, knowing these sounds I hope to harvest can’t go on forever,

some of the waves, faced off against friction, will dissipate. But some

will shift, boiling beneath the atmosphere, turning themselves around
until they turn into heat. My wife puts her hand on my chest to still me.

The sun is a squall of fire singing itself raw within a vacuum, but the moon

holds its voice beneath its surface. I lean against my wife, wordless,

Cover of Rosebud Ben-Oni’s Turn Around, BRXGHT XYXS

Tori Amos' Cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart

October 20, 2025 at 2:48 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

how the hell am I supposed to quit smoking when I'm in the midst of this fascist takeover AND while Billie Corgan thinks he can drain my bank account just so he can remind me I'm now the age of everyone I stuck my rage in a cage for when I was a tiny impressionable child ffs I really really want a c

Countdown to Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness 30th Anniversary Edition

October 3, 2025 at 3:45 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

Really thrilled to have a long poem with a title too long to fit in one of these posts in the new issue of Untelling. Many thanks to editor Melissa Helton and The Hindman Settlement School for including "Somewhere, Someone Must Know the Ending, or I Turned 42 Today; My Beard Is Filling..."

Somewhere, Someone Must Know the Ending, or I Turned 42 Today; My Beard Is Filling With Wizard-White Hairs; My Dulcimer Sits Dusty in the Living Room Corner; the Laundry and Dishes Are Piling Up Again; I Thought I Was Reading a Biography of Whitman but It’s Been More Like a Paperweight for the Past Four Months; I Haven’t Written Anything in Over a Year; and I’m Starting to Think That, Maybe, I Need to Start Thinking About Someone Other Than Myself

There’s a boy whose family moved in to the house next door last week, and he has spent the last hour jumping on his trampoline.

There’s a goldendoodle puppy chasing the air that surrounds the boy.

The parents in the house behind the boy's sing a nonsense song to their toddler while their five-year-old plays with a tiny basketball set.

There’s a calendula in my wife’s garden filled with aphids and filled with ants farming those aphids for honeydew.

The ants have such care as they carry the aphids in their mouths, placing them along the stem, under the leaves, as away as possible from the inevitable rain.

There’s a salvia that should have been divided a month ago.

The veteran down the street listens to a classic rock mix as he washes the matching brilliant black Harleys he and his wife own.

And the birds – O, the birds! – the birds carrying the wind of everywhere they’ve been during their migrations stop at our bird bath, a few splashes before hopping through our yard in search of the abundant worms.

The birds don’t mind us and we stand in wonder before them.

The stars are each in their kingdom, hidden for now beyond the big unbroken sky.

My wife on her kneeler, hunched over the garden path, pulls creeping charlie from between the pavers.

There are enough fragments of creeping charlie left behind in the soil for their return in a few weeks.

I’m meant to be present in the moment, the feel of the dirt on my cracked hands, the wind blowing my hair over my eyes, the dribble of the little mechanized fountain that draws the neighborhood wildlife to us.

The man who molested me lives in my head, but he is not alone.

This catalogue of mercies from our well-fed Earth, chives and pill bugs and lilies of the valley and robins, the neighbor boy and his dog, the dozen new perennials my wife ordered from the other end of the state – and O, what names! Penstemon and agastache and baptisia and astilbe! – and, when they arrived, secure in their cardboard boxes, she carefully dug and enriched all twelve holes and now they’re here, growing, photosynthesizing, ready soon to open their petals like a child’s eyes.

All of it, here in my head, jostling for position, for attention, bouncing between corneas and optical nerves and cortex, strolling on a paved path of photoreceptors.

There are honeybees and, tonight, back in their hive, they’ll hug each other as they sleep. Some may stay too long, may get too tired to journey home and decide, instead, to sleep inside our flowers.

The first kohlrabi stem is plump and glossy and ready for picking.

There’s an ivy cutting growing roots in a small glass of water on a window sill in my wife’s craft room.

The air plant, soil-less and free, hangs as if in flight from the kitchen ceiling, ready to collect every particle of life it needs just from the house’s humid air.

In the native corner of the garden, the viburnum is making plans to produce berries. Soon, so soon, it’ll only take a couple more years.

I’m meant to be present in the moment, my shoes wet from the dewy grass, my knees crunching as I squat down to grab a handful of weeds, my back sore in the glorious way only a day working in the yard can bring.

Someone has taught the squirrels to beg and they do it well.

I’m told my shatterstar brain is actually a superpower and I’m trying to embrace the excitable distractibility that makes me unable to see the oven mitts left on the microwave and the wide open deep freeze door, its melted frost dripping along the garage floor, the way I must speak my intentions to the world as if an incantation.

Yesterday, at the grocery store, a woman sneezed in the bread aisle and I had a panic attack while trying to find a decent peach.

I’m meant to be present in the moment, to breathe with the maple tree in the neighbor’s yard, to catch the fragments of light filtering through the ferns, to look long enough to see the coloring of the hummingbird as it darts from the blooming sage to the feeder to the telephone wire bisecting our corner of sky.

I promise the goddess in the garden that every pinch of forgiveness I’ve asked for will be paid back again and again and again.

Somewhere, someone is writing a song or a novella or lifting a baby from its crib, its wrinkled little legs flapping like wrinkled little wings.

I hope that baby isn’t crying.

I hope that someone, halfway across the world, feeling the chill of the season opposite mine, is watching the sky, wondering about the same stars I’m desperate to see this evening.

I hope that a toad or a snake moves in to our yard and startles me as it basks in morning light.

I hope that those dandelion seeds I blew last month landed somewhere moist and soft.

I hope the boy next door sleeps easy, his dog at the foot of his bed, the moonlight through his window casting a kaleidoscope across his eyes.

I hope that whoever is reading this is calm, sitting on a couch or in a chair or flat-backed in bed while someone they love is down the hall humming a song that reminds them, both of them, of being a child and running through grass, chasing the birds just to see them fly.

I hope. Again. I hope.

August 15, 2025 at 11:31 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

I grew up on these streets

August 3, 2025 at 9:47 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

....

Pulled a few tomatoes today

😶😶😶

August 1, 2025 at 9:32 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

Truly honored to have my "Bootleg Poem" included in the anthology, Delicate Machinery: Poems on Survival & Healing. It is a powerful collection, which you can download for free. Thank you Erin Elizabeth Smith and @sundresspub.bsky.social for this book.

www.sundresspublications.com/e-anthologie...

“Delicate Machinery is far from its definition. Raw, gutting, unflinching, this anthology is the embodiment of all the feelings that exist, emerge and triumph in the face of trauma. With every word, the readers are forced to reckon with their own complicity in how they’ve created the environment that is conducive for sexual violence and ultimately, face the truth of the world we inhabit. I encourage anyone who names themselves a champion for human rights to pick up this collection and sit with its rawness–heed its call so we can fashion a safer and braver society, together, one reclamation at a time.”
-Najya Williams, author of On a Date with Disappointment

“Delicate Machinery takes survivorship poetics beyond catharsis––it is a beautifully curated gathering place for poets writing the unwritable, without apology. The poems collected here capture the beauty and intensity of living on after experiences sexual violence within a sociopolitical climate that denies us bodily autonomy.”
– [sarah] Cavar, author of Failure to Comply and Differential Diagnosis

$Bootleg Poem It starts with a boy and a Walkman, but no it started long before that. It’s late and he’s mowing the lawn as the stars start to shine behind the streetlights, his mother calls to him, dinner is ready, his brother yells at him, his leg screams with rose-bush-scratched knees, and his father is probably quiet, the quietest man he’s ever known, but he can only hear the rhythm of a piano, a song about horses and milkwood and demons. And no, it started long before that, too, when stars filled his eyes, concentrating on constellations instead of the man who crawled into the bed, the hand in his pants, the hand holding his mouth, his eyes searching for planets and satellites and black holes and a question: Can you see a black hole? Yes, he thought that, in that moment, at a time like that, and yes, it started even before that, the first fist to the ribs, the first shove into a locker, the first the second the third the fourth tears running off his cheeks, to his mouth, settling on his tongue, where they stayed, where they curled like a semicolon, like a tattoo, like a reminder, a lesson about silence and safety, and now he sees them, everyone calling him, their mouths a pantomime, a dissonant music video, as he turns the mower and his back on them, the song turning to its bridge, the strange piano nearly silencing the lyrics he doesn’t yet understand but feels moving under his skin. He needs this, this moment, this darkness, alone, to dream himself away. They call to him, and I want to say, no, for now, let him be an X-Man on the Starjammer, soaring through Shiar space, let him have spandex bursting against three-color stars. Maybe tomorrow he’ll be a Power Ranger or a Ninja Turtle, in church he’ll grow a tail and blue fur and save the life of the girl, the cute one with the freckles just like his who asked for his help with fractions, who touched his arm and,$

when he jumped, smiled and swore
she wouldn’t hurt him. But it started before all of this, before
the cassette he stole from his brother, before losing tug-of-war
to a girl, he and his tears kicked out of the classroom, before
his ripped pajamas, before his parents, long before the man
with the boy’s sperm on his hands and lips, back before
the first person spoke the first word, before the continental shift,
before the earliest wind and waves, the first volcanic explosion,
back when the first particulate collision destroyed that first,
endless silence. And it continues, after the lawn is finished,
the dinner cold and ruined, after the high school where he learned
to turn invisible, beyond to almost thirty years ahead, when
I can look at him and say, honestly, everything is not a fight
between silence and sound, when I can pluck the tears from
his tongue and say, tell me your secrets, all of them, even
the ones you’ve hidden from yourself, when I can hold him,
stilled like a memory, because he is a memory, a living recording
like the bootlegs we love, and because I can hold him
I can keep him calm as he tells me what I already know,
what neither of us knew how to say, and when I stroke his hair,
he doesn’t flinch, he doesn’t hide, he listens and, yes, he sobs,
and I sob, and I tell him to never stop looking to the sky,
I tell him the stars are like in the song: your demons can’t go there.
And maybe, together, we can make some sense of the silence
of this solar system, what we spent all those nights looking to,
our arms stretched as far as they could go, our hands grasping
and coming away empty, still empty now, but I know it’s okay,
I tell him it’s okay. Now, decades later, satellites took pictures
of a black hole. Now, I can show him the invisible, the unimaginable,
the impossible. Now, I can show him how beautiful it all is.

July 28, 2025 at 10:17 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

The brothers are together again. See you on the other side, Ozzy.

July 22, 2025 at 9:43 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

Since damn near every ant in an ant colony is female and the males are really only there for *one* purpose, to the point that many species evolved so male ants are born without (evolutionarily unnecessary) mouths...

it's kinda amazing Ant-Man lived for his entire first issue

Black and white picture of Ant-Man by Jerry Ordway, slightly altered by me in the face area

July 21, 2025 at 11:35 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

Watching the baby bunny that seems to have moved into the garden and worked on some sketches.

July 13, 2025 at 10:04 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

Rest in Peace, Fanny Howe 💙

Near Miss

Fanny Howe

I almost met you
On a Saturday
In Gloucester.
The wind blew easterly.
There was a jar of mums
On a table near the window.

Their yellows were calling
To each other.

Place-names
Were put back
In the pencil drawer
Before I noticed your shadow.

July 9, 2025 at 1:53 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

Seriously, Lorde's album killed a Sharpie today

July 2, 2025 at 9:41 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

Cannot believe it's been fifteen years. I still hear your voice everyday, Rane.

Rabe Arroyo, 1954-2010

Today's poem is by Rane Arroyo

Temporary Sanity

I'd watch the Muppets just to piss off
Papi. I came home briefly in my 20s:
a failure as a poet, lover, martyr.

He wanted to watch sports, but
I insisted Miss Piggy and Kermit
helped heal me. Mami would give

Papi that look: it's your fault
that your oldest son is acting like
un niño. I was always good at chess,

revenge a la my pop-up Scorpio nature.
Papi would groan and growl whenever
the maddening Swedish Chef mumbled.

This is stupid and America is stupid.
How I'd laugh, later, at the bars where
go-go boys stayed-stayed. Take that,

Papi, for not buying me those shoes
that I needed to try out for the track
team. Slowly, I became addicted to

the Muppets (all the toys I never had
come alive). My Kermit, I now live in
a city whose nickname is Frogtown

and Papi has run away to Puerto Rico,
where animals are slaughtered
before they learn to speak and sing.

May 7, 2025 at 6:54 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

Eeek!

So excited to get the new @westtradereview.bsky.social (Spring 2025), w/ my poem "Bootleg Poem (" Horses"by Tori Amos)"!& to share space w/ favs @emmabolden.bsky.social, @hanvanderhart.bsky.social, & so many more!

Get it (& read the full poem) here:
www.westtradereview.com/spring2025ed...

Cover of West Trade Review, pretty flowers with amazing humans growing out of them

Bootleg Poem

It starts with a boy and a Walkman, but no it started long
before that. It’s late and he’s mowing the lawn as the stars
start to shine behind the streetlights, his mother calls to him,
dinner is ready, his brother yells at him, his leg screams
with rose-bush-scratched knees, and his father is probably
quiet, the quietest man he’s ever known, but he can only hear
the rhythm of a piano, a song about horses and milkwood
and demons. And no, it started long before that, too, when
stars filled his eyes, concentrating on constellations instead
of the man who crawled into the bed, the hand in his pants,
the hand holding his mouth, his eyes searching for planets
and satellites and black holes and a question: Can you see
a black hole? Yes, he thought that, in that moment, at a time
like that, and yes, it started even before that, the first fist
to the ribs, the first shove into a locker, the first the second
the third the fourth tears running off his cheeks, to his mouth,
settling on his tongue, where they stayed, where they curled
like a semicolon, like a tattoo, like a reminder, a lesson
about silence and safety, and now he sees them, everyone
calling him, their mouths a pantomime, a dissonant music video,
as he turns the mower and his back on them, the song turning
to its bridge, the strange piano nearly silencing the lyrics
he doesn’t yet understand but feels moving under his skin.
He needs this, this moment, this darkness, alone, to dream
himself away. They call to him, and I want to say, no,
for now, let him be an X-Man on the Starjammer, soaring
through Shiar space, let him have spandex bursting against

April 21, 2025 at 11:01 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

Huh - that's me on @versedaily.bsky.social

www.versedaily.org/index.shtml

And thanks to @theshorepoetry.bsky.social for originally publishing this weird poem about a weird performance of "Donut Song"

Image of the homepage of Verse Daily saying "Today's poem is" Come In, Houston, or Everything I Know I Learned from the Guitar Solo in Tori Amos' "Donut Song" (Live in Frankfurt, Germany" by Anthony Frame from The Shore

April 3, 2025 at 3:24 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

April 1, 2025 at 11:25 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

So incredibly honored to be in the new issue of @theshorepoetry.bsky.social with my poem, "Come In, Houston, or Everything I Know I Learned from the Guitar Solo in Tori Amos’ “Doughnut Song” (Live in Frankfurt, Germany, 1998-06-23)"!

www.theshorepoetry.org/anthony-fram...

Come In, Houston, or Everything I Know I Learned from the Guitar Solo in Tori Amos’ “Doughnut Song” (Live in Frankfurt, Germany, 1998-06-23)

Lately, I've been into transformation,
the way a wing can be a dream, a stream of flight,

the aurora borealis as a battle between
light and atmosphere, gravity and our brittle eyes

as referees. I want to always remember all of the firsts,
the first kiss followed by the first blissful sigh,

the first foggy morning that covered me
with its gorgeous cloudy cold, the first star that startled me

when it seemed to briefly blink away. I plant
a row of sunflower seeds and know the word

future. If these fifteen foot flowers are suns, and
yes they are, then I choose to be their satellite, the way

fungi serve a forest, the mycelium making the soil more
than just a mess of nutrients. Yes, let me be

the fungi, and, yes, one day I will be but not here,
not now, my feet having finally found the ground

—for once I won’t let this be about death. Can I
say that? So directly? I'm learning, when the string

is plucked, the note matters more
than the instrument. Somewhere,

in the depths of space, a star is dying and in
the drama of its death, hundreds of new stars will

be seeded. And that’s how we were made, too,
one tiny element born from a breaking supernova

building newer, bigger elements, again and again and
again and then, love, there was you and me.

Yesterday, as I cleared a bed for peppers, you kissed me
on my balding crown, removed my earbuds, and said,

Do you hear the earth breathing? Listen. I want
to always remember those sounds passing between

my hair, always aware of the chattering squirrels, of
the sunflowers breaking their seed pods, that battle between

dirt and shoot. I'm learning my hair is always growing.
My fingernails, dirty and dented, are always growing,

The child next door, the birds at the bird bath, even
the soil, always growing. Have I done it yet?

Changed my metaphors from death to birth? From fear
to future? The earth and you and I are breathing

and I'm listening. I want to remember
—no, I will always remember it all.

Remember, you and I began as stardust. Whatever
we turn into, let us live up to that brilliance.

March 21, 2025 at 11:28 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

Happy Pi day

$Pi by Anthony Frame Let the orbit of his eyes last forever, unpredictable, despite mixed messages sent from brain to limbs. Are we more than the fractal of our nerves, a carnival of fibers, bonded, binding us? We spent a week tracking a number that refused to end, searching for what we know we cannot know. Now, I wait to see if skeletons can dance, to find a tree with branches that match the veins of its leaves. But for erosion, winter wind, the city's saws. But for entropy and the wheelchair he’ll end up in. Everywhere is a radius, the suns we drew with sidewalk chalk, the cells under attack, his wrist as he waves goodbye. O, infinity, forgive us, you're so close we can almost touch you. But for decay, but for a spinal tap that uncovers god's smudged fingerprint. And where is god now but in the cumulonimbus clouds, towering without center, waiting to unleash a squall? Unless it chooses not to. We who believe, he who refuses, let us follow a number until our eyes sag, until the clouds part and all that's left to grab is sky. Until the holes in our nerves crash our dried bodies to the ground. Let us follow as far as our faith can take us, one number at a time, until we find a truth. And all the truths hidden deep within.$

March 14, 2025 at 11:21 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

March 12, 2025 at 11:41 AM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

Michelle Trachtenberg 1985-2025 💔
Rest in peace, little sis

Michelle Trachtenberg as Dawn in Buffy the Vampire Slayer 1985-2025 💔

February 26, 2025 at 7:37 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

I am apparently immune to all of the conspiracy theory videos on YouTube.

Not so much for the bookbinding videos, though.

February 24, 2025 at 10:14 PM

Anthony Frame

@anthonyframe.bsky.social

So extremely grateful to @jasonbcrawford.bsky.social for including my poem "This Ars Poetica Is Not About “Hey Jupiter” (But Then Again, Knowing Me, It Probably Is)" in Poet Lore's Ekphrastic Poems Folio, with so many other wonderful poets! Including friend @rosebudbenoni.bsky.social!