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itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
@itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
590 followers 510 following 630 posts
Experimenting with creative writing
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itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Goldenrod season
brings the sun
into our wild yard
& for two weeks
we are #famous

#emoetry

📷 of my inspiration this afternoon
Image of a row of small golden flowers sticking out of dense green and beige growth on a blue background. A few dried branches extend up into the sky
September 17, 2025 at 4:14 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Here's my quick #PoemsAbout #Candlelight — not sure what this one means, really, but these words suddenly came out last night.

Love reading all the great poems from this community!
I am opened and closed, spilling myself like wasted wax, holding onto a flicker, a wink, a twist of blue-gray smoke. It's like all the cicadas holding still for one night-heartbeat and I waver with the flame
September 12, 2025 at 2:53 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Thought I'd try making a small photo of beach finds organized by color, inspired by @silverpebble2.bsky.social.

Then my kid got involved and it spiraled into chaos.

But it got him looking closely at the colors, patterns, and textures, so I think it was a success! & we have a new hobby
A top-down view of a collection of rocks and beach glass loosely organized by color, on a white background. At the bottom and blue and green pieces, then brown, pink, and orange, with white and light gray pieces around the edges.
September 7, 2025 at 8:06 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Hah, I chose a weird passage to highlight how Thomas can make even Manhattan pollution sound poetic, but the short story is about a temporary pond that sprang up during construction and was occupied by goldfish. The ASPCA came, the pond will be filled, but what if the goldfish had time to evolve?
Ponds of ancient New York landfill mud, crawling on their new little feet, out onto the sidewalks, up and down and across the street, into doorways and up the fire escapes, some of them with little suckers on their little feet, up the sides of buildings and into open windows, looking for something, will come the goldfish. It won't last, of course. Nothing like this ever does. The mayor will come and condemn it in person. The Health Department will come and recommend the purchase of cats from out of town because of the constitutional boredom of city cats. The NIH will send up teams of professionals from Washington with a new kind of antifish spray, which will be recalled four days later because of toxicity to cats. After a few weeks it will be finished anyway, like a lot of New York events. The goldfish will dive deep and vanish, the pond will fill up with sneakers, workmen will come and pour concrete over everything, and by next year the new building will be up and occupied by people all unaware of their special environmental impact. But what a time it was.
September 5, 2025 at 3:12 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
A few decades late on this, but The Medusa and the Snail (Lewis Thomas) is a gem

I'm sure the science has not all held up to the passage of time—the writing remains poetic and lovely, even in supremely weird passages

#booksky #writingcommunity
propagating themselves, worst of all surviving in what has to be a sessile eddy of the East River, somehow threaten us all. We do not like to think that life is possible under some conditions, especially the conditions of a Manhattan pond. There are four abandoned tires, any number of broken beer bottles, fourteen shoes and a single sneaker, and a visible layer, all over the surface, of that grayish-green film that settles on all New York surfaces. The mud at the banks of the pond is not proper country mud but reconstituted Manhattan landfill, ancient garbage, fossilized coffee grounds and grapefruit rind, the defecation of a city. For goldfish to be swimming in such water, streaking back and forth mys-teriously in small schools, feeding, obviously feeding, looking as healthy and well-off as goldfish in the costliest kind of window-box aquarium, means something is wrong with our standards. It is, in some deep sense beyond words, insulting.
September 4, 2025 at 4:25 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
And another #smallpoemsunday

Letters, Ilya Kaminsky
(from You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World)
LETTERS Rain has eaten 1/4 of me yet I believe against all evidence these raindrops are my letters of recommendation here is a man worth falling on
August 31, 2025 at 6:55 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Finally finished the fantastic National Dish by Anya von Bremzen—highly recommend keeping a notebook or your phone nearby so you can look up all the interesting dishes, people, and historical facts

#booksky
White book cover with the words NATIONAL DISH written at the top in large orange letters. Subheading reads: AROUND THE WORLD IN SEARCH OF FOOD, HISTORY, AND THE MEANING OF HOME. Beneath this nine dishes are illustrated, labeled Ramen, Pizza, Mole, Tapas, Pot-au-Feu, Borsch, Pasta al Pomodoro, Rice, Mole. The author's name, Anya von Bremzen, is written at the bottom in blue.
August 30, 2025 at 4:57 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
A short poem about the aftermath of a big outburst of energy for #PoensAbout #Riot. I wasn't quite sure where to go with that one but I'm loving all the great responses to this prompt!
Self-portrait as a riot In the aftermath of this day shattered-glass memories are swept into tidy piles to be sorted, swallowed, sanitized. The walls grow quiet, streets well-behaved, snuffed fires smolder into hush. I still see the graffiti in my dreams.
August 29, 2025 at 5:52 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Heretofore Unuttered
Nicole Sealey

#poetry #poetrycommunity
Heretofore Unuttered As if god, despite his compulsions, were decent and hadn't the tendency to throw off all appearance of decorum, here I am admiring this single violet orchid. How lucky am I to go unnoticed or so I imagine, when, at this writing, there is a red-tailed hawk, somewhere, tracking the soft shrills of newborn songbirds -?
August 28, 2025 at 4:03 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Just finished the fantastic Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen — so many brilliant, memorable poems, but FOR POWER FOR PRAYER FOR PROMISE FOR PEACE really stands out right now. Some of my favorite lines in screenshots below.
#booksky #poetry
// says there are some things too hallowed for forgetting // too much of history to forgive THE POEM SAYS, SPEAK THE AFTERMATH OF HISTORY // THE WALL SAYS, FUCK THE POLICE //
August 27, 2025 at 5:27 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
This #PoemsAbout #chandelier brought to you by an old childhood house that was definitely not haunted
The chandelier was not haunted; it did not shine ghost-light on our walls, shadow-play movies acted out in tandem as we reached for the bread, the wine, the milk. The chandelier was not haunted; not any more than the laundry chute, opened wide enough to swallow our worn-through bits and spit them into a basement bin. The chandelier was not haunted; and nothing blew through the crab- apple leaves but wind, wind, wind come in from the lake on a long journey down from Canada. The chandelier was not haunted; only a five-year-old would tell ghost stories like that to her parents at bedtime, and only a five-year- old carries their memory.
August 22, 2025 at 2:19 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
For #WednesdayWIPs I'm sharing a personal project: 6 6-line cento poems written from the same 6 randomly selected pages of a book over 6 days. An experiment in how the things we notice & hold onto in a work change from day to day. There's so many different ways to look at the same piece
6 Centos - You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World 37, 48, 47, 110, 100, 8 8/19/25 the waters should run to flow & are snagged like the yearning in dreams what's the point now it was the language we spoke to one another I am learning this again and again falling, an ending. this is a process 8/20/25 not above where dark clouds curves without words by instinct, swarmed low mouthing the stressed and unstressed to the fact of acceptance and this holy blush of loss late spring winds sound an ocean
August 20, 2025 at 3:09 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Halloween moon crab 🤞
Photograph of a crab partially in the water with six bright orange-red legs and two purple, black-tipped claws raised in the air. The crab has a red-orange body with a black stripe around the edge and black eye stalks
August 19, 2025 at 10:22 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Good morning #PoemsAbout! My contribution for #StarCrossed. I wasn't quite sure where to go, so I started with a Romeo & Juliet cento and built from there—a fun experiment, though it ended with something not very R&J themed. Looking forward to reading everyone's poems!
How deep does our need to illuminate, elucidate, through fire and powder and lightning, run through our odd bones? Happiness shows off her plumage and instead of taking her bounty at its word we test her for weaknesses until the winning hand is lost and we look behind to see another moment of boundlessness has vanished like a summer sigh.
August 1, 2025 at 1:51 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
I wonder if the #porpoise knows
that in the minds of man it lived
for a while as mythical sea swine;
died for a while as a delicacy fit
for kings & clergy; & bobbed along
as a silly sort of verb. I wonder
what the porpoise has known
of us?

#blueskyrelay
Porcus marinus (sea-hog) - miniature from folio 119r from Der naturen bloeme (KB KA 16) by Jacob van Maerlant. A black and white mythical sea creature leaps out of a green wave against an orange background
July 29, 2025 at 4:49 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
#blueskyrelay #ship
This poem is a message in a bottle The ship has sailed You are here, x, You will be okay You can build from this
July 4, 2025 at 5:20 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Good morning #PoemsAbout! A little piece about a place in a constant state of #transition. Looking forward to reading everyone's poens!
Every day I walk the same stretch of beach, half a mile from anywhere swooshing waves draw in the hue of the day smashing it on the shore with a roar fading to shush spiraling in a perfect cycle of gather-advance- disperse-retreat shaping the coast with sand shell rock driftwood glass shifting from some deep and mutable history until one day the whole coastline belongs to someone else
June 20, 2025 at 1:53 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Thanks for traveling with me #blueskyrelay! It's my last day as host before @arwashington.bsky.social takes over & I've had so much fun I'm tempted to start my own weekly prompt (do we need any more?) Thank you all for your great posts!

I leave you with a beacon: #lighthouse

📷: Michigan, US
Photograph of a white, red, and black lighthouse on a pier against a blue sky with a small white cloud in the upper righthand corner. The reflection of the lighthouse can be seen in the calm water beneath the pier. Text overlay reads: lighthouse; /ˈlaɪt.haʊs/; a tall building near the coast or shore with a flashing light at the top to warn ships of rocks and other dangers
June 17, 2025 at 1:28 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Happy #Bloomsday from my very depressing bookmark. One day I will finish reading... maybe when my kid is in college.
Photograph of a green book, James Joyce's "Ulysses", with a bookmark sticking out in an early section of the book. "jj" is written on the cover in large black letters.
June 16, 2025 at 4:42 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Happy Monday #writersofbluesky!

The #blueskyrelay prompt for June 16 is: #awake. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but all cities have their own unique energy that stays up late and rises early.

As always, all uses and styles are welcome!

📷: New York, US
Photograph of a blurry orange, yellow, and pink sunset framed by rows of dark city buildings. Bokeh lights can be seen in the windows of the buildings; an illuminated walk sign and green traffic light can be seen in the lower right. Text overlay reads: awake, /əˈweɪk/, to not be sleeping; to wake up, or make someone wake up
June 16, 2025 at 1:47 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
A man says "I once saw that guy become Trigorin" (from Chekhov's play The Seagull) while a woman looks on
June 15, 2025 at 4:50 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Good morning #blueskyrelay! Your word for the 15th is: #seagull.

These highly intelligent birds can symbolize freedom, self-discovery, & resilience—though some see them as pests.

We still need a host for the 18th-25th. Please send me a message if you're interested!

📷: Rhode Island, US
Photograph of a lone brown and white seagull walking on the beach towards a breaking wave, facing away from the camera. The seagull has one foot in the air and appears to have something in its beak. The lighting is pale. Text overlay reads: seagull; /ˈsiː.ɡʌl/; a bird that lives near the sea and has short legs, long wings, and white and gray feathers
June 15, 2025 at 12:47 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Good morning #writersofbluesky!

The #blueskyrelay word for June 14th takes us back downtown: #graffiti

Whether it's political, funny, or just aesthetic, it adds some color & interest to drab concrete and brick.

All uses and styles welcome & encouraged!

📷: London, UK
Close-up photograph of a wall with many layers of graffiti, including blue, red, and white spraypaint, with white spraypaint text reading ""Graffiti Tour Cancelled"". A sticker reading ""Good Kiss Spot"" can also be seen. Text overlay reads: graffiti; /ɡrəˈfiː.t̬i/; words or drawings, especially humorous, rude, or political, on walls, doors, etc. in public places; to write or draw graffiti on walls, doors, etc. in public places
June 14, 2025 at 11:58 AM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
NO KINGS with a picture of a crown covered by a red "X"
June 13, 2025 at 9:49 PM
itsmagicalmcb.bsky.social
Good morning #blueskyrelay! Today (June 13) we're watching the #waves rearrange the shore and finding the treasures they leave on shore.

All uses, tenses, & styles welcome—just have fun with it! And, if you have time, browse the tag and offer some support to the #writingcommunity.

📷: Montauk, US
Photograph of a wave crashing next to a large boulder covered in algae; bright white foam can be seen where the wave is breaking against the rock; more waves with whitecaps can be seen in the background. Text overlay reads: wave; /weɪv/; a raised line of water that moves across the surface of an area of water; to move from side to side
June 13, 2025 at 12:34 PM