Brian Simoneau
LightNews LightNews
banner
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Brian Simoneau
@briansimoneau.bsky.social
1.1K followers 780 following 27 posts
Poet & teacher. Author of NO SMALL COMFORT (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) & RIVER BOUND (C&R Press, 2014). He/him.

https://www.briansimoneaupoet.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Happy to see my poem “Mercy” featured on @versedaily.bsky.social over the weekend! Please click through if you’d like to read about my daughter’s moment of terror in a 16th-century castle: www.versedaily.org/2025/mercy.s...
The first 8 lines of my poem “Mercy” on Verse Daily: Today's poem is by Brian Simoneau Mercy —St. Mawes Castle, Cornwall The moat beneath us gone to garden, sea rose and Cornish heather, the old guardhouse peddling ice cream and trinkets, we crouch through a doorframe and notice wood and stone engraved to flatter the king whose coffers built this little fortress protecting the harbor and its deep-water inland passage. A stairway curls down the wall and a hole in the floor makes my daughter scream:
August 19, 2025 at 12:55 AM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Anthony Robinson, “I Am the King of Infinite Space,” Failures of the Poets (Canarium Books, 2023)

#sealeychallenge
#thesealeychallenge
On a desk, a paperback book of poems: Failures of the Poets, Anthony Robinson. "I AM THE KING OF INFINITE SPACE" We were young & we were shattered. We took our lives & we settled down. "I like your town & your trees & your bodies of water" the way the music drains out across a field. No vision here. The house we built no more than a maintenance shack. Insect shells. Dry road. No visions. I don't believe I understand. God was happening all at once & even though we didn't believe, he made us good in the wind, made us something big & dead & so comes love, so comes this anniversary. So comes again up, empty, open on the face of the waters. Open across the breadth of the sea.
August 6, 2025 at 3:52 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Erika Meitner, “Invitation to Tender” from Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022)

#sealeychallenge
#thesealeychallenge
On a desk, with a #2 pencil, a paperback book: Useful Junk, poems, Erika Meitner, with the cover art “Masculine Still Life” by Genesis Belanger. Invitation to Tender My friend Danielle tells me to use a slightly more capacious we in my poems & I look up capacious: ample, roomy, vast, immense & think of the church marquee across from Publix: God is real & loves you since the you is all of us & we don't deserve this enormous Earth. Along the beach here people walk the wrack line, heads bowed or plant themselves on their knees in one spot searching for washed-up shark teeth in the shell hash. Our configurations of attention are sometimes surprising— is it capitalism or adoration that tells us we can inhabit anything? There are many ways to participate in (egress from?) this world. See the molten sun dropping into the Gulf? The lightning in the distance blinking the clouds, trying to warn us? There are still loggerhead nests roped off with tri- angulated wood stakes & orange caution tape though just today the Endangered Species Act was weakened to clear the way for mining & drilling & development. Every day at dawn volunteers walk the beach to count hatchlings, release any left behind into the Gulf so they don't get eaten by predators. If there is an invitation to tender it is written in drift toys & sea glass—dunnage swept in by the tide & left right at our feet. We can all procure. We can all excavate. We can all strip down to our softest parts & (satisfy the client) make our best offer.
August 4, 2025 at 11:11 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Matthew Henriksen, “Requiem For Now” from The Absence of Knowing (Black Ocean, 2015)

#thesealeychallenge
On a desk with a #2 pencil, a paperback book with [Matthew Henriksen] [The Absence of Knowing] printed in a sans serif font on a sky-blue rectangle on a white background. Requiem for Now Try I tell myself Not to impose a narrative When I cannot see where my wife looks in a mirror Our first plan belonged to us Our daughter protests for eggs Her feet tiny heart bird claws Our second plan belonged to marriage Where blood circles the moon We liked to live in the open parts of plants I don't need to tell a story My daughter laughs out a window's mouth Talks like trying to count the air Her repetition wringing worry out
August 1, 2025 at 7:24 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
If you’re looking for a break from the heaviness of these weeks, please consider joining me, Christina Cook, Marcia LeBeau, & Taté Walker for the Pen Parentis Literary Salon tomorrow, Tuesday January 14, at 7pm ET. We’ll be reading a few poems and talking about our writing & parenting experiences.
Promotional graphic for the Pen Parentis Literary Salon featuring Marcia LeBeau, Taté Walker, Brian Simoneau, and Christina Cook, Tuesday, January 14, at 7pm ET.
January 14, 2025 at 1:17 AM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Sara Eliza Johnson, “The Abyssal Zone” & “Lazarus” from Vapor (Milkweed Editions, 2022)
The Abyssal Zone Sometimes it's seaweed in your throat you can't cough out or an inkeloud expanding in your skull. Sometimes it's primal like the force of an oyster making a pearl to protect itself after a harvester surgically implants its poison, or the heart growing a tumor that can't be extracted without killing you, or pressure crushing your lungs to fists deep underwater. Sometimes, you sink so far down from the sun your tongue bloats like an anglerfish floating in a well, lost, unable to breathe or speak, but each day you feel it trying to say something about the shining dead language it once knew, watch its cells burst into blue specks of light when you open your mouth. A tiny syllable. Then darkness again. But each time a little bluer, a little more like the home you've forgotten, my stranger looking back at me from the mirror, just wanting me to reach through and hold you. Lazarus Through the mist I see as the first mammals once saw through their forests, dark photons translating matter into shape: shadowflower, shadowstone, the ripple of bees and their shadowblood weeping inside the trees. My first eye stares back at mine and into my chest pours a weight, an infinite pressure inside my heart or left lung like an extinction echoing backward into the first cell of its animal, my body colder in that spot. A thumbprint blooms between my breasts where a stranger once pressed and being so alone I open like a grave.
November 26, 2024 at 7:40 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
My poem “Suburban Eclogue” from issue 42 of Post Road
Walk with me down the block. Notice the rows of maples, perfectly straight, evenly spaced from the road and one another, precise lines running yard to yard, remainder of careful plans, prosperity's spread to what once was forest, once farm—every golden age remade over and over, parceled out and subdivided when footpath turned bridleway turned turnpike turned trolley turned traffic. History sped up with each expanding step but look: I have found in my house a spot where, lying on the floor, I can see no other house, no poles, no wires stretching away along the road, no road at all but only tree, only sky, bare limbs framed in my window the way the first name on the deed thought his prospect would always stay unchanged in all the ways it changed with him. We can utter our every wish and scrutinize all the old maps, but we must come to understand there is never a going back and too: future versions of us will walk this very block (ruins unearthed from layers of fallout or avenue of steeples, steel and glass) and they will imagine this moment of chalk-drawn sidewalks and mulch-bordered lawns, worthy days to recall, a glimpse of something a new angle might help them find.
November 26, 2024 at 5:06 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Honored & grateful to learn the editors at Post Road have nominated my poem “Suburban Eclogue” for a Pushcart Prize:
www.postroadmag.com/2024/04/22/4...
The cover of issue 42 of Post Road: cover art is “Restored to Mint” by Vincent Dion, a photo of a pale blue 1970s-ish Chevy that’s been junked—shattered windows, hood detached, front tire lying among weeds and wildflowers in the foreground.
November 26, 2024 at 4:36 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
“I am no less grateful for / the berries than for the thorns that are // meant, I think, to help”

—Carl Phillips, “All It Takes” from The Rest of Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004)
ALL IT TAKES Any force— generosity, sudden updraft. Fear. Things invisible, and the visible effects by which we know them. Human gesture. Betrayed, betrayed. The dampness of fog as understandable by how, inside it, from within their thicket of nowhere left to hide— that leafless the winter berries, more than usual, shine. First always comes the ability to believe, and then the need to. The ancient Greeks; the Romans after. How they made of love a wild god; of fidelity— a small, a tame one. I am no less grateful for the berries than for the thorns that are meant, I think, to help. As if sometimes the world really did amount to a quiet arrangement. Cut flowers. Make death the one whose eyes are lidless. And —already— you are leaving. You have crossed the water.
November 18, 2024 at 4:45 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
“I have tried to / imagine all the space that // is not the star”

—Prentiss Moore, “Trace” from The Garden in Winter and Other Poems (University of Texas Press, 1981)
Trace If a star were a man. If a star is a man. Such power. I have tried to imagine all the space that is not the star. A man sees what is near him, the beginning of his absence, its trace in his mind. What is a fanatic other than one who has tried to reclaim all he has lost.
November 12, 2024 at 2:56 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Prentiss Moore, “Poem” from The Garden in Winter and Other Poems (University of Texas Press, 1981)
Poem one sees the budding of trees it seems always two or three days after it begins, like awakening from a sound one did not actually hear
November 12, 2024 at 4:15 AM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Kasey Jueds, “Stratus clouds form” from KEEPER (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)

#thesealeychallenge
Stratus clouds form when a layer of air is cooled to the saturation point, and today I want to call it kindness: like lilacs permitting us their scent just sometimes, off to one side of the entire, rain-shined bush, mountains keep to themselves behind gray, thinking we can't hold all of this at once. In Siena I saw a leafless tree, covered in oranges, and St. Catherine's head preserved behind glass in the church, as if too much wholeness could be too much. Then last winter I forgot about daffodils, and felt so surprised when they returned, yellow all the way through like a ball of wool that, even behind a closet door, contains the baby's blanket wholly in its globe, and waits for our hands to begin.
August 7, 2024 at 5:31 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Taneum Bambrick, “Drinking in the Company Truck” from VANTAGE (American Poetry Review, 2019)

#thesealeychallenge
DRINKING IN THE COMPANY TRUCK We're six, tossing glass beer bottles at the hole of a fire pit. Six worn-through back pockets. The print of chew-disks. We spit red. We smoke. Binocular women on speed boats. Call their chests bald eagles. Jail bait. Joke about one's daughter's age. Six experience labor devaluation— ex-loggers ex-construction. Six thieves in a field of onions. Cry while skins open. The freeway heat. Cry drinking water bottle whiskey. Corona from an empty Pepsi. We're six hated. Six sexist. Six reactions to one's dying wife. The wind chimes she cut from cans of Bud Light. How, without one, five fight. Knuckles twisted white. Five sweep webs off the ceiling slats of a duck blind. We're flashlights scouring that dirt road looking for one's lost pocket knife.
August 6, 2024 at 8:14 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Dana Levin, “Ars Poetica (the idea)” from Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

#thesealeychallenge
The cover of the poetry collection Wedding Day by Dana Levin, which features the photo “Me and My Human” by Vincent Laforet. Ars Poetica would it wake the drowned out of their anviled sleep — would it slip the sun like a coin behind their eyes— - - - - The idea, the teacher said, was that there was a chaos left in matter—a little bit of not-yet in everything that was— so the poets became interested in fragments, interruptions— the little bit of saying lit by the unsaid— was it a way to stay alive, a way to keep hope, leaving things unfinished? as if in completing a sentence there was death—
August 2, 2024 at 7:32 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
January Gill O’Neil, “Harvest” from Glitter Road (CavanKerry Press, 2024)

“I need a moment without malice, // an hour without doubt or debt / or death”

#thesealeychallenge
The cover of Glitter Road: poems by January Gill O’Neil, featuring a color map of the Mississippi River Meander Belt by Harold Fisk, US Army Corps of Engineers, 1944 Harvest September, summer's humid sigh. I stretch my body out under the harvest moon, arms akimbo as I stand alone in my back yard hidden under a canopy of oaks. I need a moment without malice, an hour without doubt or debt or death. I need a moment when no one wants or needs me, no questions, no answers, where nothing can eclipse me but earth's shadow, silent as an afterlife. And I am heavy on the ground surrounded by brown grass and leaves as the first rough acorns of fall begin their descent. The sky is empty of everything except the deepest darkness and a rising moon. I am thankful for this minute of pause, before gravity pulls me in, says, Begin again.
August 1, 2024 at 6:56 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Martín Espada, “Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn” from FLOATERS (Norton, 2021)
Death Rides the Elevator in Brooklyn On a winter morning in 1968, my father left to walk the picket line. He rode the elevator in his black coat, hood over his head in the hour before daybreak. On the third floor, the doors opened. A white man waiting for the elevator stood there, peered at my father in his black coat and hood, in his brown skin, then screamed and fled. The doors closed. My father laughed on the picket line that morning. He laughed for years. The guy thought I was Death, he would say. Death rides an elevator in Brooklyn, mugger Death, militant Death, Puerto Rican Death. Listening to the story, as the screaming man screamed louder with every telling, I never thought one day my father would be the man standing there, waiting for the elevator doors to open. He did not stare or scream or run. He stepped into the elevator, and the doors closed behind him. The cover of Floaters: poems by Martín Espada (winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize) features the photo “Angel Luis Jiménez, Evicted Mushroom Worker, Kennett Square, PA, 1981” taken by the poet’s father Frank Espada.
March 20, 2024 at 10:21 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
“Do you consider yourself a part of or apart from? // Where you are apart from, what do you cast into the distance? // A poem is a line cast into the distance.”

—Claire Schwartz, from “[The original gesture]” in CIVIL SERVICE (Graywolf Press, 2022)
March 18, 2024 at 7:34 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
To have wanted
more, where has that
carried me,

if what
so much matters
now can be proven

later to all
along have been doomed
not to?

—Carl Phillips, “By Hard Stages” from Rock Harbor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)
All the glories— ribbed, and separate, collective sway-in-the-wind. Shut them. To have wanted more, where has that carried me, if what so much matters now can be proven later to all along have been doomed not to? The governing drift was from sensation to distraction to irrelevance: "they came to nothing," it says here, "en route settling for things like heat falling mostly against, light mainly falling, between them a bush or a skull shimmering like another example of absence of will—with heat only, shivering" Do I make a difference? or What is it so persuades, I must make one? The text breaks like a road forking where none warned of ... Look at yourself, Look at you. Have I not looked there— possibility for —into it? How small, without effort almost, can be the leap from it-is-findable to we-have-found-it. Though not water, not the flash, even, as if off of that which could be water, could also not be— To have called it water. "They crossed themselves, they gave utterly themselves over to what wasn't there, that it might save, or drown them…”
March 14, 2024 at 5:37 PM
briansimoneau.bsky.social
Jon Anderson, "The Secret of Poetry" from The Milky Way: Poems 1967-1982 (Ecco, 1983)
THE SECRET OF POETRY When I was lonely, I thought of death. When I thought of death I was lonely. I suppose this error will continue. I shall enter each gray morning Delighted by frost, which is death, & the trees that stand alone in mist. When I met my wife I was lonely. Our child in her body is lonely. I suppose this error will go on & on. Mornings I kiss my wife's cold lips, Nights her body, dripping with mist. This is the error that fascinates. I suppose you are secretly lonely, Thinking of death, thinking of love. I'd like, please, to leave on your sill Just one cold flower, whose beauty Would leave you inconsolable all day. The secret of poetry is cruelty.
December 10, 2023 at 7:35 PM