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bandytstamp.bsky.social
Sarah Alice
@bandytstamp.bsky.social
400 followers 260 following 210 posts
a willingness to play to ashes
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bandytstamp.bsky.social
often the shadow seems more real than the body

“After A Death”, Tomas Tranströmer (tr. from Swedish by Robert Bly)
AFTER A DEATH Once there was a shock that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail. It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy. It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires. One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun through brush where a few leaves hang on. They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories. Names swallowed by the cold. It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat but often the shadow seems more real than the body. The samurai looks insignificant beside his armor of black dragon scales.
November 7, 2025 at 5:06 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
their smoke will fill your mouth

Elizabeth Willis, from “The Witch”💀
When a witch desires something that is not hers, she will slip it into her glove. An overwhelming power compels her to take something from a rich man's shelf. I have personally known a nervous young woman who often walked in her sleep. Isn't there something witchlike about a sleepwalker who wanders through the house with matches? The skin of a real witch makes a delicate binding for a book of common prayer. When all the witches in your town have been set on fire, their smoke will fill your mouth. It will teach you new words. It will tell you what you've done.
October 31, 2025 at 7:14 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
June Jordan, from “Poem at the Midnight of My Life”

#smallpoemsunday
I understand the comfortable temptation of the dead: I turn my back against the grave and kiss again the risk of what I have instead
October 26, 2025 at 4:56 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
the owlishness of certain people

Heather Christle, from PAPER CROWN
Beset by a Disk of Radiating Feathers Barn owl, crossing the air over the road, dangerous softness of the owl allowing silent approach, favorite bird of Minerva, feeding on mice and small birds, fern owl, horned owl, how can I get one, a lady or person rambling a long way into the night, long tufted or mottle-tufted, neighbor to the one cat, never have seen one relaxing, not a falcon, an owlet, the owlishness of certain people, reputed wisdom of, on a small green bag of potato chips, snowy owl, a tamed owl goes hunting and relinquishes all that he kills, tawny owl, they say the Owle was a Bakers daughter, well known by its doleful hoot, what does an ow's egg look like, where are we going to live
October 10, 2025 at 3:58 AM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
Who am I, I’ve said

Natalie Shapero, from STAY DEAD
#smallpoemsunday
Really Raining Every time I've seen the moon, I've thought it was the Earth and I'm somewhere else gazing at it, gauging whether I'll make it back someday. Every time I've seen the sun, I've thought it was the Earth-moon burning and said goodbye. I've always made a point, every time I've seen rain, of announcing IT'S REALLY RAINING, even if it's just a spattering here, a spattering there. Wow, IT'S COMING DOWN. Who am I, I've said, to say what it's like in the spray for somebody else, and by SOMEBODY ELSE I mean of course that bug, smacked over by an eighth inch of water, splayed and aeriform. When you're slight enough to be ended by a single drop, a single drop's a storm.
September 21, 2025 at 5:59 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
the deep / rosined bow sound of the living

Dorianne Laux, “Cello”
#smallpoemsunday
CELLO When a dead tree falls in a forest it often falls into the arms of a living tree. The dead, thus embraced, rasp in wind, slowly carving a niche in the living branch, shearing away the rough outer flesh, revealing the pinkish, yellowish, feverish inner bark. For years the dead tree rubs its fallen body against the living, building its dead music, making its raw mark, wearing the tough bough down as it moans and bends, the deep rosined bow sound of the living shouldering the dead.
September 7, 2025 at 5:46 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
closing thoughts for James Dobson

Wanda Coleman, “Black-Handed Curse”
BLACK-HANDED CURSE May the sky widen between your eyes and a storm twist across your thoughts. May the false images you create devour all you give birth to. May the false images you worship obscure love. May you look in the mirror and see the malignancy. May you writhe in dishonor. May you writhe hearing the voices of those you have dishonored. May you writhe knowing the whole of the pain you've caused others. May the limitations you impose on those more gifted than yourself steal the beats of your heart. May you be kept out of the heaven from which you have kept others. May no one hear your last words. May a small rodent eat your last words.
August 21, 2025 at 3:45 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
Happy anniversary, Tom & Kristi!💛

Paige Lewis, “When I Tell My Beloved I Miss the Sun”
#smallpoemsunday
WHEN I TELL MY BELOVED I MISS THE SUN, he knows what I really mean. He paints my name across the floral bedsheet and ties the bottom corners to my ankles. Then he paints another for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game, saying, Oh! I'm sorry for stepping on your shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels of your shopping cart. It's all very polite. Our shadows get dirty just like anyone's, so we take them to the Laundromat-the one with the 1996 Olympics-themed pinball machine— and watch our shadows warm against each other: We bring the shadow game home and (this is my favorite part) when we stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled my beloved grips his own wrist, certain it's mine, and kisses it.
August 10, 2025 at 4:38 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
Anne Carson, from MEN IN THE OFF HOURS

#smallpoemsunday
EPITAPH: EVIL To get the sound take everything that is not the sound drop it Down a well, listen. Then drop the sound. Listen to the difference Shatter.
August 4, 2025 at 3:17 AM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
new ginger bestie: (tap tap tap) Can I get in there? Earth’s haunted.

me: What?

ginger b: Earth’s haunted.
A svelte ginger outside cat perched on a front porch tapping at the window.
July 18, 2025 at 5:30 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
Out of the spigot / streams a thirsty noncompliance

Diane Seuss, from “Coda”
#smallpoemsunday
Sometimes a bone makes a sound when it breaks. It sounds just as you'd imagine it would sound. Other times the bone is as quiet as a really good burglar breaking and entering. There used to be a prairie that extended way past the ending of every story. An expanse of sedges and grasses and wind, which made a sound like a sprinkler when the water has been turned off for the nonpayment of the bill. The what? The bill. The unpaid water bill. Out of the spigot streams a thirsty noncompliance. An antisong.
June 22, 2025 at 5:15 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
Ross Gay, “American Dreaming”
American Dreaming Bootstraps like barnacles on boats. Bootstraps in blankets. Bootstraps in bibles. Bootstraps on bonnets bubbling up from the brook's bottom. Bootstraps make a slave's back bloom. Bootstraps in back rooms. Bootstraps cinched to shackles in the womb. Plumes of bootstraps billow and consume. Bootstrap nooses. Bootstrap bullets. Bootstrap bombs dropped on buildings from which blazing bodies blossom. Bootstraps dangling from coffins shaped like bassinets in which ankles fester and weep.
June 15, 2025 at 3:09 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
this is what it’s like to dream, to have access to all these stories and be in one unquestionably.

–Alice Notley🖤
My strongest emotion is always, I don't know how I'm going to pay for my time here. Why should that be the human feeling You are interpreting sensations someone had thousands of years ago A drunken theater of surgeons operating on your eye and other auto parts. The man says, Knock the visual frame into a new place. Everything's blurry for an instant but this isn't my eye. Under the sky bombing your old dark house somewhere, and the pipes installed by pioneers, was I one, this is what it's like to dream, to have access to all these stories and be in one unquestionably. At the same time I arrive. They said I transformed you terribly by showing you texts of a radical ecstasy; this is my story. I am becoming your eyes. -Alice Notley
May 20, 2025 at 6:22 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
new candid of my heart
putty colored water bottle featuring a black and white sticker with text stating “intentionally blank”
May 20, 2025 at 3:47 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
Fanny Howe, “Yellow Goblins”
An errant yellow tulip among the shrubbery, displaced and thriving. Yellow goblins and a god I can swallow: Eyes in the evergreens under ice. Interior monologue and some voice. Weary fears, the usual trials and a place to surmise blessedness.
May 5, 2025 at 2:18 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
Michael Ondaatje, from “House on a Red Cliff”
The long, the short, the difficult minutes of night where even in darkness there is no horizon without a tree just a boat's light in the leaves Last footstep before formlessness
May 1, 2025 at 4:09 AM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
The first word wasn’t love, was it?

Alina Stefanescu, from her incredible new collection, MY HERESIES
#smallpoemsunday
Cosmologies A partisan of erotic absolutism, reticent megalomaniac even among the divers, at the same time messenger of the halo, Paul Celan. Paul Celan (in the first prose poem he signed as Paul Celan) I We began in cosmic obscenity— the lascivious bang was the sound of light's excess opening its mouth. The first word wasn't love, was it? It was this once that sat upon a time we can't locate in physics. It was the science of bread being broken and eaten. I am still terrible at division. I halved my whimpers when my mother vanished. It is still easier to subtract than to be split.
April 27, 2025 at 4:59 PM
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Sarah, the teacher would report, eschews / the burdens of responsibility.

Linda Pastan, “Ethics”
ETHICS In ethics class so many years ago our teacher asked this question every fall: if there were a fire in a museum which would you save, a Rembrandt painting or an old woman who hadn't many years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs caring little for pictures or old age we'd opt one year for life, the next for art and always half-heartedly. Sometimes the woman borrowed my grandmother's face leaving her usual kitchen to wander some drafty, half imagined museum. One year, feeling clever, I replied why not let the woman decide herself? Linda, the teacher would report, eschews the burdens of responsibility. This fall in a real museum I stand before a real Rembrandt-old woman, or nearly so, myself. The colors within this frame are darker than autumn, darker even than winter—the browns of earth, though earth's most radiant elements burn through the canvas. I know now that woman and painting and season are almost one and all beyond saving by children.
April 24, 2025 at 5:37 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
another murder
Sepia-toned early spring tree with bare branches covered in perching inky crows, one in flight smudging the sky.
April 22, 2025 at 4:30 AM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
Robert Hass, from “Faint Music”

#smallpoemsunday
I had the idea that the world's so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.
April 13, 2025 at 5:11 PM
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Lizzie Riches, “The Gardener’s Assistant”
A person clothed in cloak + crown composed of green leaves and white flowers while holding a garden spade. Their figure is planted solidly among the flora as they gaze directly at the viewer.
April 8, 2025 at 2:50 PM
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Remember, green’s your color.

Gwendolyn Brooks & Ross Gay
TO THE YOUNG WHO WANT TO DIE Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait: will wait a week: will wait through April. You do not have to die this certain day. Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. I assure you death will wait. Death has a lot of time. Death can attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment. You need not die today. Stay here -through pout or pain or peskyness. Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow. Graves grow no green that you can use. Remember, green's your color. You are Spring. Sorrow Is Not My Name BY ROSS GAY -after Gwendolyn Brooks No matter the pull toward brink. No matter the florid, deep sleep awaits. There is a time for everything. Look, just this morning a vulture nodded his red, grizzled head at me, and I looked at him, admiring the sickle of his beak. Then the wind kicked up, and, after arranging that good suit of feathers he up and took off. Just like that. And to boot, there are, on this planet alone, something like two million naturally occurring sweet things, some with names so generous as to kick the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon, stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks at the market. Think of that. The long night, the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah. But look; my niece is running through a field calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel and at the end of my block is a basketball court. I remember. My color's green. I'm spring. -for Walter Aikens
April 8, 2025 at 1:34 PM
bandytstamp.bsky.social
say you came from the moon

Ellen Bryant Voigt, “The Cusp”
The Cusp So few birds—the ones that winter through and the geese migrating through the empty fields, fording the cropped, knuckled stalks of corn: all around us, all that's green's suppressed, and in the brooding wood, the bare trees, shorn of leaves or else just shy of leaves, make a dark estate beneath low clouds that have the look of stubborn snow. In a purely scientific exercise— say you came from the moon, or returned like Lazarus, blinking from the cave— you wouldn't know if winter's passed or now beginning. The bank slopes up, the bank slopes down to the ditch. Would it help if I said grieving has an end? Would it matter if I told you this is spring?
April 4, 2025 at 2:12 PM
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“Prayer to Artemis”🏳️‍⚧️

by Diotimus
translated by Stephanie Burt
Greek Anthology 6: 267 Goddess of culverts and lighthouses, goddess of burrows and coves and safety in narrow escapes, stand where you stand and shine like kindness on our children. From you they learn right and wrong, and how to wear capes for hunting or self-concealment, how to find a turtle's egg-cache, or a rabbit warren, how to distinguish a dangerous impulse from a lovely whim, when to keep a flower or a friend, and where it's safe to swim. It's hard work, I know, to shine all the time, but it's never pointless. Sometimes it's divine.
March 31, 2025 at 2:42 PM
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calling me by many names / that are secret and filled with light

Denis Johnson
#smallpoemsunday
WHITE, WHITE COLLARS We work in this building and we are hideous in the fluorescent light, you know our clothes woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us, turning and returning like the spray of light that goes around dance-halls among the dancing fools. My office smells like a theory, but here one weeps to see the goodness of the world laid bare and rising with the government on its lips, the alphabet congealing in the air around our heads. But in my belly's flames someone is dancing, calling me by many names that are secret and filled with light and rise and break, and I see my previous lives.
March 16, 2025 at 5:28 PM