Jacob JB
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jajobi.bsky.social
Jacob JB
@jajobi.bsky.social
78 followers 120 following 210 posts
Queer first, him second || No MFA, no NYC || Let’s do a litmag || Dissenting Missourian || Cellular carbon &c. || Seeking sangha

Works: https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/jacob.j.billingsley
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jajobi.bsky.social
from the Academy's poem of the day, smallholding by Brian Teare, dedicated to the bloodroot that will bloom in Shenandoah NP this spring
October 29, 2025 at 6:26 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
John Phillips in the current issue of Noon Poetry
Tyrant. The toy children on his train never grow up They are killed by real soldiers
August 10, 2025 at 6:34 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
The other day I read this series of June Jordan's, which concludes with a fascinating, breathless travelogue at and around Pompeii. But I like this little rainy poem which speaks (in my reading) about solidarity and the ways we fail to realize it. She's the best.
Palm Sunday (we) duck underneath umbrellas covering a snug an ugly light of the wonderdreadful faces that the watering streets the concrete textures of transition literal to rain like faulty colors strip away to livid blameful coloring a wet a temporary ransack through the earlier when the rain started up so unreasonable like one child as the whole house atmosphere the separate bodies separated dry when no one will try the umbrella no one will try anything anymore
August 4, 2025 at 5:11 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Seclusion of course means far from the world
…no sounds of a market day or night
I burn dry leaves in my stove to make tea
and to patch my old robe I cut a cloud by the cliff
lifetimes seldom fill a hundred years
why suffer chasing profit and fame

—The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse
A cat looking alert from inside the white and wood-tone cube of his cat tower. His right front paw is poised on the entryway to the cube, ready to pull him forward in exit. His gaze is fixed on something to the left of the camera, the slim vertical white streak that marks his nose adding to the pointedness of his gaze.
August 2, 2025 at 1:01 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
This body lasts about as long as a bubble
may as well let it go
things don't often go as we wish
who can step back doesn't worry
we blossom and fade like flowers
we gather and part like clouds
I stopped thinking about the world a long time ago
relaxing all day in a teetering hut

…
A picture of my gray tabby cat with a white belly and paws in a curled up but sprawled, relaxed position, sleeping. His front and back paws are intermingled. He is in a white box, part of his cat tower.
August 2, 2025 at 12:50 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Zebulon Huset in @ogre.red

The rest of the poem: ogre.red/issues/2025-...
Follow the link to read the whole poem, only part of which is pictured here.
July 28, 2025 at 4:49 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Who is gonna pick all these up
A clustered arrangement of the following volumes on a gray couch and dark blue blanket with white specks. The front covers are mainly visible: John Ashbery, collected poems through 1987 Peter Gizzi, Fierce Elegy Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things Felicity by Mary Oliver Habitual Prayer by Ava Chen (selected for a prize by Danez Smith) Midland by Kwame Dawes (year 2000, his first collection) The current issue of AGNI, number 101 Tell Me Something About Buddhism by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
July 28, 2025 at 3:00 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things (2015)
This is the cooling part of the fever, when everything: the jumping girder of the Golden Gate's red limb, the tall metal tree house of the Empire State, the black rock cliffs off the Sonoma coast, the drawer's leftover pills, the careless cut, the careening car, the crosswalk, the stop/go, the give up, give up, done, all of it, slows to a real nice drive by. A view of some tree breathing and the mind's wheels ease up on the pavement's tug. That tree, that one willowy thing over there, can save a life, you know? It saves by not trying, a leaf like some note slipped under the locked blue door (bathtub full, despair's drunk), a small live letter that says only, “Stay.” The Saving Tree, a poem by Ada Limón
July 25, 2025 at 5:42 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Wendell Berry, from the selected
A DISCIPLINE: Turn toward the holocaust, it approaches on every side, there is no other place to turn. Dawning in your veins is the light of the blast that will print your shadow on stone in a last antic of despair to survive you in the dark. Man has put his history to sleep in the engine of doom. It flies over his dreams in the night, a blazing cocoon. O gaze into the fire and be consumed with man's despair, and be still, and wait. And then see the world go on with the patient work of seasons, embroidering birdsong upon itself as for a wedding, and feel your heart set out in the morning like a young traveler, arguing the world from the kiss of a pretty girl. It is the time's discipline to think of the death of all living, and yet live.
July 22, 2025 at 3:15 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Cat on a light gray sofa making a grumpy face but not at the camera. Behind him, a red book. Below him, a dark blue blanket with white specks. To the right, a tea kettle on a table and a window showing the dark of night and the reflections of interior lighting.
July 22, 2025 at 2:46 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Here we gooo

Poem chain 0.1

You may break the chain at any point of course but we wanna build toward a conclusion I think
Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir. “Oread,” a poem by H.D.
July 21, 2025 at 8:11 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Weirdoposting readymade. I broke my hip and collar bone and it’s my LUMBAR that starts hurting, no thank you, but yes Dustin Hofmann get that bath
July 16, 2025 at 2:57 AM
jajobi.bsky.social
from Some Imagist Poets, 1915
Screenshot of a poem on Project Gutenberg: Trees. Elm trees and the leaf the boy in me hated long ago— rough and sandy. Poplars and their leaves, tender, smooth to the fingers, and a secret in their smell I have forgotten. Oaks and forest glades, heart aching with wonder, fear: their bitter mast. Willows and the scented beetle we put in our handkerchiefs; and the roots of one that spread into a river: nakedness, water and joy. Hawthorn, white and odorous with blossom, framing the quiet fields, and swaying flowers and grasses, and the hum of bees. Oh, these are the things that are with me now, in the town; and I am grateful for this minute of my manhood. *** By F.S. Flint
July 15, 2025 at 11:48 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Mairead Case in Dreginald #24
Screenshot of the final section of a poem on a lavender background, demarcated with an asterisk: A body can ... continue I can watch the cat gently eating her food The sky can be described forever I romanticize it because it is Hair in my mouth Red gray salt Two men missing This is always now and it is the sun the last of the cake wrapped in foil Here we go to love and with it, for ever for always
June 24, 2025 at 7:05 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
from Flow Chart
John Ashbery
A single block of text, a full page of a book-length poem: for forgetting and in an instant I remembered everything: the schoolhouse, the tent meeting. And I came closer until the day I wrote my name firmly on the ruled page: that was a time to come, and all happy crying in memory placed the stone in the magic box and covered it with wallpaper. It seemed our separate lives could continue separately for themselves and shine like a single star. I never knew such happiness. I never knew such happiness could exist. Not that the dark world was removed or brightened, but each thing in it was slightly enlarged, and in so seeming became its true cameo self, a liquid thing, to be held in the hollow of the hand like a bird. More formal times would come of course but the abstract good sense would never drown in the elixir of this private sorrow, that would always sing to itself in good times and bad, an example to one's consciousness, an emblem of correct behavior, in darkness or under water. How unshifting those secret times, and how stealthily they grew! It was going to take forever just to get through the first act, yet the scenery, a square of medieval houses, gardens with huge blue and red flowers and solemn birds that dwarfed the trees they sat on, need never have given way to the fumes and crevasses of the high glen: the point is one was going to do to it what mattered to us, and all would be correct as in a painting that would never ache for a frame but dream on as nonchalantly as we did. Who could have expected a dream like this to go away for there are some that are the web on which our waking life is painstakingly elaborated: there are real, bustling things there and the burgomaster of success stalks back and forth, directing everything with a small motion of a finger. But when it did come, the denouement, we were off drinking in some restaurant, too absorbed, too eternally, expectantly happy to be there or care.
June 4, 2025 at 7:06 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Frank O’Hara
Collected Poems p.133
Poem: When your left arm twitches it's like sunlight on sugar to me and my tongue seeks the sea of your skin, its oily calm of green light on the floor of the ocean as in parting, there's a flutter between us while I haul down a flag and you look absently out of my heart so you won't see what light one fears in the sea that I don't want you to know is of you in me … The poem has no end punctuation. There is a half-line break here: “of the ocean / as in parting.”
May 29, 2025 at 4:19 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Mark Irwin, from Bright Hunger
A double-spaced poem: Fuse. Most of what I do or read does not help me understand what is always going. I turn and the was gets bigger, a blanket that has covered many: I see bodies kindle as they pass; their voices hiss to nothing. Distance takes us. We move through it until alas we're all horizon. Time works this way. Love as many people as you can. Remember them passing.
May 28, 2025 at 5:58 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
This was a very good sentimental queer family book about an impossibly successful poet
Screenshot of the Libby library app, picturing the cover of This Love by Lottie Jeffs. You can also see what I’m currently reading, After the Parade by Lori Ostlund
May 26, 2025 at 7:22 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Robert Creeley
Poem by Robert Creeley, on the arc of a paperback page: AMERICA America, you ode for reality! Give back the people you took. Let the sun shine again on the four corners of the world you thought of first but do not own, or keep like a convenience. People (emphasized) are your own word, you invented the locus and term. Here (emphasized), you said and say, is where we are. Give back what we are, these people you made, us (emphasized), and nowhere but you to be.
May 21, 2025 at 8:39 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Alex Gourevitch in the ever-on-point @bostonreview.bsky.social
Working in tandem with well-organized networks of “anti-antisemitism” advocacy groups, the administration is wielding antidiscrimination laws and “safetyist” rationales the right has spent years attacking to carry out the “counterrevolution blueprint” that Manhattan Institute senior fellow C.R. laid out in December, calling for purging universities and the federal government of “left-wing ideologies.” How should we fight back against this new McCarthyism? And to what end? As teachers and students learn just how little control they have over campus, it is clear that we need not just a general defense of academic freedom but also a more specific and absolutist defense of the right to protest. A democratic society generally, and colleges and universities in particular, must protect the right to engage in public, disruptive acts—including those that feature open expressions of hostility to political views—even at the cost of some people feeling discomfort or even intense unease. That was the prevailing attitude toward protest on campus for the past several decades, and it served all students, as well as the mission and vitality of the university, well. Indeed, after the social movements of the 1960s pushed their way onto campus, universities rightly came to tolerate—even celebrate—protest as an ordinary part of university life, viewing it as a sign of the life and health of a community devoted to collective learning. As former Columbia president Lee Bollinger put it in 2008, “the ’60s were significant in establishing freedom of expression,” both on campus and off. It was a mistake, he concluded, to bring in the NYPD after students occupied a Columbia administration building in 1968. Even crackdowns at the time were not as severe as they have been in recent months. At the peak of anti-Vietnam protests in 1969, when millions rather than thousands of students were marching and occupying, only around 4,000 students were arrested—a vastly smaller percentage than today.
May 17, 2025 at 6:29 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
you won't know how earned this ending is until you read the poem in @chestnutreview.bsky.social
Part of a poem by Ridwan Fasasi: I have ached to be so beautiful. It doesn’t take much to love anything that knows nothing of impermanence. I know nothing of grief yet—not the banishment, not the endless walking. The crickets are burning their sullen songs into the night. There’s a serpent coiled around a trunk. Eve is stretching her hand again. I trust completely whatever is in it. Highlighted portion: The crickets are burning their sullen songs into the night. There’s a serpent coiled around a trunk. Eve is stretching her hand again. I trust completely whatever is in it. Also pictured: The poet's bio, with a picture of him. Ridwan Fasasi: Swan I, is a Nigerian poet of Yoruba descent. He is the winner of the 2024 Labari Prize for Poetry. A Pushcart Prize Nominee whose works have appeared/ are forthcoming on ANMLY Lit, Akpata Magazine, Euonia Review, Lucent Dreaming, Strange Horizon, Hindsight creative and elsewhere. He tweets @Ibn_Yushau44.
May 15, 2025 at 3:05 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Robert Creeley, bent
A poem in free verse couplets: America, you ode for reality! Give back the people you took. Let the sun shine again on the four corners of the world you thought of first but do not own, or keep like a convenience. People are your own word, you invented that locus and term. Here, you said and say, is where we are. Give back what we are, these people you made, us, and nowhere but you to be. … *** … Note: “People,” “Here,” and “Us” are emphasized with italics in the original text. Presented here with all-caps instead: PEOPLE are your own word, you invented that locus and term. HERE, you said and say, is where we are. Give back what we are, these people you made, US, and nowhere but you to be.
January 16, 2025 at 7:52 PM
jajobi.bsky.social
Gary Snyder, excerpt

1974, New Directions
Only the end of the poem is pictured; the full text is available on Poets.org. It's called Mother Earth: Her Whales and is by Gary Snyder, from a book called Turtle Island. This poem has a lot of indentation which screen-readers may not be able to convey. How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist Government two-world Capitalist-Imperialist Third-world Communist paper-shuffling male non-farmer jet-set bureaucrats Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil? (Ah Margaret Mead . . . do you sometimes dream of Samoa?) The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth To last a little longer like vultures flapping Belching, gurgling, near a dying doe. “In yonder field a slain knight lies— We'll fly to him and eat his eyes with a down derry derry derry down down.” An Owl winks in the shadow A lizard lifts on tiptoe breathing hard The whales turn and glisten plunge and Sound, and rise again Flowing like breathing planets In the sparkling whorls Of living light. Stockholm: Summer Solstice 40072
January 15, 2025 at 5:55 AM
jajobi.bsky.social
excerpt, Bob Hicock, on a bus
Excerpted portion of "Go Greyhound" by Bob Hicock As we entered Arizona I thought I smelled the ocean, liked the lie of this and closed my eyes as shadows puppeted against my lids. [A gray sans-serif e-reader page number, 47, is also included to hint that the rest of the poem continues with the next page.]
January 15, 2025 at 5:22 AM
jajobi.bsky.social
Peter Gizzi, Archeophonics, part four of “A Winding Sheet for Summer.” I shared part one a while back.
Part 4 of A Winding Sheet for Summer: All the stars are here that belonged to whatever was speaking. I built my life out of what was left of me. Sky and its procedures. A romanticism of clouds, trees, pale crenellations, and poetry. A musical joybang. Touching everything.
January 13, 2025 at 9:24 PM