Callista Buchen
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callistabuchen.bsky.social
Callista Buchen
@callistabuchen.bsky.social
1K followers 220 following 33 posts
poet, author of Look Look Look: blacklawrencepress.com/books/look-look-look, "Taking Care": https://poems.com/poem/taking-care/
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callistabuchen.bsky.social
Hurray for @blacklawrence.bsky.social Back to School Sale! Get 40% off Look Look Look and other titles! blacklawrencepress.com/books/look-l...
Black Lawrence Press Back to School Sale. Take 40% off our online store with code BACKTOSCHOOL40 Cover of Callista Buchen's Look Look Look. An anatomical cut out of the body with words in pink letters.
September 5, 2025 at 3:11 PM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
Find my chapbook THE BLOODY PLANET on sale this month at @blacklawrence.bsky.social (just $5!) along with amazing books from so many admirable writers. blacklawrencepress.com/books/the-bl...

#poetry
Coherence CALLISTA BUCHEN Two months after the wasp sting, the bruise is hard and small, the size of a button on a men's dress shirt. A faint ring shadows the bruise, and she touches the center. Its hardness grows into her arm, toward the bone, and she feels the burn under her fingers. He says he doesn't see anything. She thinks her forearm will become a rock if she is not careful. Her body feels further away already. Some morning when she leaves the house, the rock will break off from her body when she knocks against the doorjamb, forgetting the hardness that pulls against her shoulder. It will fall in many pieces, get lost in the gravel. She won't notice for a long time. Only when she reaches for the bruise, after they have set out their clothes for the next day, after he tells her she is pretty, after he quiets and breathes with his whole body, will she imagine the loss. Book cover; orange cracked ground with the text The Bloody Planet poems by Callista Buchen
April 3, 2025 at 7:55 PM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
Hurray! Super honored to have two poems in the latest Quarterly West, and extra grateful to the editors for a Pushcart nomination. Poetry forever!
QUARTERLY WEST 8754 73 •112 Callista Buchen Pinking Shears about names / saw-toothed and biting / how language / is like a thread / or how language / is either what / cuts or the cut / itself / I am / cutting the linen / edges frayed / but less so / metallic yawn / like how / to pink / once meant / to pierce or stab / and later to decorate / but also the flower Dianthus / which is a family / of carnations / scalloped edges / and dots of / half-closed / eyes / and pink / has been / a boat / a fish / something / small something / excellent / with / these scissors / at least there is / less lost / a small eye / the fish / the stabbing / of the body / and the word / the new thing / about to be / made While improperly darning a hole in my son's new red sweater I start with You Tube videos because I want to get this right, to learn competence as love. I'm learning to fix this scar, starting a quarter inch away from the hole, repair anchored in what hasn't yet unraveled, guiding the needle through loops of knit before I turn and weave vertically, tiny checkboard whole. He's always loved red, one of the first colors infants can see, one of the first colors used in art. Past red, we can't see color, though we feel them, infrared and hot, something like yearning. My first mistake involves the knot. No, my first mistake is my choice of needle, which is wrong. Then the knot. I'm using thread instead of yarn, but I go on anyway. He loves red like armor, his bureau drawers full of fire, what he chooses over and over. I close the video. There are times I have been brave, but I don't know how to pretend to know what is best. I prick my finger, drop of blood (if it was there at all) invisible, in this patch I create to cover the gap. I'm not fixing a scar after all. No, I'm making the scar itself, mapping that which has been lost, acknowledging what is left. He just wants the sweater back. Later, were sitting at the table and he runs his thumb over and over the patch, touching it without thinking, a good luck charm, so sure I did it right.
November 27, 2024 at 8:44 PM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
Husband has been baking bread this week, so bringing back this love poem for him that first appeared in last fall’s RHINO.
Callista Buchen Bread In our home, my beloved does The baking. I have no patience For proving, no touch for Kneading, for knowing when Enough is enough. But when he Smells like bread, my body Becomes an oven. Sometimes There is flour in his hair. Some Times I remember his long-ago job at the bakery, out on early Morning delivery, how he’d be home by lunch in a cloud of that Warmth, which never quite washed Out, always a little bit sweet. Baking is believing things usually Work out. I am not good at feeling Loved, I tell my beloved, who Shapes the dough, who reaches For me like I am an answer Or a recipe, like he wants me Like I want him. No, he says, when I take small bites, when I try to make The bread last a little longer. No, He says, eat. We’ll make more.
November 14, 2024 at 4:14 AM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
So much stretchy, squishy love.
A white cat stretches upside down with a buff cat in a cat bed on a desk.
November 11, 2024 at 8:48 PM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
Pretty obsessed with these sleepy cuddle monsters we adopted in September, Wally and Iris. They help us remember we all need more love and more naps.
A white and ginger cat sleeps on his side with all his limbs akimbo. A buff cat sleeps on her back with her paws curled up.
November 11, 2024 at 8:12 PM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
Here’s one of mine!
Taking Care Callista Buchen I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don't say, shhh. I don't say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we've returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I'm with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow and one small.
November 10, 2024 at 7:16 PM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
The best of all the days!
A white and orange cat and a buff cat snuggling a lap.
November 10, 2024 at 2:52 AM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
Our new kittens!
Two orange kittens cuddling in a cat bed.
November 10, 2024 at 1:06 AM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
New poems up today at Quarterly West, one on the etymology of pinking shears, and the other on my son’s red sweater and trying to parenting right.
hile improperly darning a hole in my son's new red sweater I start with You Tube videos because I want to get this right, to learn competence as love. I'm learning to fix this scar, starting a quarter inch away from the hole, repair anchored in what hasn't yet unraveled, guiding the needle through loops of knit before I turn and weave vertically, tiny checkboard whole. He's always loved red, one of the first colors we feel them, infrared and hot, something like yearning. My first mistake involves the knot. No, my first mistake is my choice of needle, which is wrong. Then the knot. I'm using thread instead of yarn, but I go on anyway. He loves red like armor, his bureau drawers full of fire, what he chooses over and over. I close the video. There are times I have been brave, but I don't know how to pretend to know what is best. I prick my finger, drop of blood (if it was there at all) invisible, in this patch I create to cover the gap. I'm not fixing a scar after all. No, I'm making the scar itself, mapping that which has been lost, acknowledging what is left. He just wants the sweater back. Later, were sitting at the table and he runs his thumb over and over the patch, touching it without thinking, a good luck charm, so sure I did it right. after all. No, I'm making the scar itself, mapping that which has been lost, acknowledging what is left. He just wants the sweater back. Later, were sitting at the table and he runs his thumb over and over the patch, touching it without thinking, a good luck charm, so sure I did it right.
August 24, 2024 at 3:11 AM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
Today’s morning walk across the lake with the kids. Saw new water birds, mosaics, and ice fisherman.
January 27, 2024 at 5:23 PM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
"Elms"
Louise Glück
All day I tried to distinguish need from desire. Now, in the dark, I feel only bitter sadness for us, the builders, the planers of wood, because I have been looking steadily at these elms and seen the process that creates the writhing, stationary tree is torment, and have understood it will make no forms but twisted forms.
October 13, 2023 at 7:59 PM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
So delighted to have this poem about my husband and the time we fought about whether a bird was a loon or a cormorant in the newest NIMROD. He was right, but I got a poem, so...

#poetry
October 6, 2023 at 9:27 PM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
I'm working on a new #poetry collection about what it means to make things, especially women and handcrafts. So thrilled to have a poem out in the latest Nimrod about Ida Holdgreve, who sewed for the Wright brothers' plane factory. "Nothing / flies without Ida. 120 planes. She does her job."
In a picture of the factory floor, you can see Ida Holdgreve, there in the back, sitting, arms out and elbows flexed. She’s feeding the fabric under the needle, maybe a Singer Industrial. She’s looking at the work. Not at the photographer or the man in the foreground, assembling the skeleton of a wing. Huge windows, back there, and Ida’s backlit and fuzzy, almost a ghost. She is not the subject. If she turned around, she could see the propeller nearly out of frame. She had made dresses in Delphos for a while, surrounded by the corn, and then she went to Dayton. The picture doesn’t say why. Sixty years later, they interviewed her, and she said, The ad wanted a girl for plain sewing. This is the great joke—the typesetter must’ve thought he was correcting the copy. Plain sewing, she said, I figured I could do that. Most of the story is what Ida remembers about Orville and Wilbur, like their proximity is what makes her interesting. But there aren’t any planes in the photograph. It is almos
October 1, 2023 at 6:33 PM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
fall family portrait
Four maple leaves of gradually smaller sizes in clover
September 29, 2023 at 9:14 PM
callistabuchen.bsky.social
Love poems have always been hard for me to write, though it has never been for lack of inspiration. Two decades of practice (and life with my beloved), and I feel like I'm starting to get closer. (this one is from the latest RHINO) #poetry
September 29, 2023 at 2:07 PM