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jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
james o
@jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
1.1K followers 770 following 570 posts
James O'Leary / was Willow James Claire for a while / Poet Writer Reviewer / they / Assistant Poetry Editor for Anomaly / free palestine 🇵🇸
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jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
really loving Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere
Animals “I think I could turn and live with animals” Walt Whitman O Walt you were wrong, they aren’t placid or self-contained I just watched a spoonbill make carpaccio out of a frog &crocodiles dining on wildebeests trying to cross the Maro River It’s wrong to say O in poetry these days which makes me want to have a loud orgasm right here in an unashamed animal way
November 3, 2025 at 6:30 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
The newest issue of @anmlymag.bsky.social is here! There are many excellent poems in this issue. I want to shout out them all, but I'll start with McLeod Logue's "Descent" a ghost story in the shape of a chasm, a poem that floored me the first time I read it
McLeod Logue Descent Night glows gold like blood stains, like first lost tooth. The crunch of a change: brutal. Begin again. I hear the slow essence of retraction. It glistens. This morning I make eggs in bare feet, wilt white onto windowsill. The slim reap of my body. I’m seeing faces that aren’t mine in the mirror, some other me who scabbed and started fresh. I feel my blood pumping, every heartbeat the same lonely terror. The eggs cool. The whole house sighs. I can feel my nested wandering, the ghost’s shadow stretching, making moods that affix. The wind chimes move, catch shapes I couldn’t see. The noose of a song slopes, creeks a stair that wasn’t loose before. I feel the hollow calling: the hole in my stomach eating itself. You want me to describe my white cotton panties, tangled mass of hair. My bones. You want to hear the ways I opened myself, let light into vein and perfect pink. Here: The first time I ever opened the door, there was an endless dark. A sinking deepness that flattened. I mean, when it creaked on its hinge, the whole house numbed. How do you describe eternity? How do you live in a place that creases the fold? That swallows it.
October 15, 2025 at 4:27 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
Venus, take me in your summer gown

Sally Wen Mao
Valentine for a Flytrap You are a hairy painting. I belong to your jaw. Nothing slakes you—no fruit fly, no cricket, not even tarantula. You are the caryatid I want to duel, dew-wet, in tongues. Luxurious spider bed, blooming from the ossuaries of peat moss, I love how you swindle the moths! This why you were named for a goddess: not Botticelli’s Venus, not any soft waif in the Uffizi. There’s voltage in your flowers: mulch skeins, armory for cunning loves. Your mouth pins every sticky body, swallowing iridescence, digesting light. Venus, let me swim in your solarium. Venus, take me in your summer gown.
October 5, 2025 at 3:18 AM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
Nora Hikari

@systemwires.bsky.social
A poem breaks After Claire Heinzerling Along the places most tend er. A poem peel s like fruit. Fingers dug into the softest parts, war m and flowing. The man ner of violence is quiet. Gentle, even. “Son” the kin g of a poem says.
September 21, 2025 at 2:32 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
Fortunate to have a poem that's very special to me in the newest issue of Four Way Review 💙

fourwayreview.com/issue-33/
BLUE PERIOD by James O’Leary It’s 9:31 PM where the end of the city tinges the sea. An empty spiderweb hangs motionless between the blinds & the closed window leaking the street’s neon onto the unmade bed. No moon. Not even the comfort of wine, bottles shaped like the body I want, & will never have. I keep thinking about the group of boys I passed huddled around their broken car like priests over an altar. I want to drink, to forget; it makes the fashion of my sadness tolerable. Driving on the highway, city -fluxed, sober, trying to ignore my engine light, my mind’s tidal drift reminds me I never made it to my childhood best friend’s funeral. Avoided it, so I didn’t have to see his family, the sharp angles of his still face. The radio asks where the joy has gone; I try to find it, I do, admire clouds, make food for the people I claim to love. & the difference between a claim & a lie is my hands, their learned fluency in devotion under the passage of each spent moon. & the difference between the end of the sea & the start of the sea, is how I feel when I open the window & listen to the pages of the water turn. Tonight the sky tastes like ozone & time—I buy a bouquet of chrysanthemums for my beloved, a full tank of gas. There’s safety from suicidal ideation in imagining the material reality of the other drivers, the names of their daughters or sons as strange as wildflowers a loved one might leave on their sudden tombs. After I spend the night piecing back together what fragments I can still recall of my first friend’s face, I am however sober it takes to watch the ghosts of our hometown retreat from the blanket of the rising sun.
August 16, 2025 at 3:59 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
thinking about this dove’s brilliant bird feeder hack
a dove on a bird feeder. instead of sitting on the ledge and getting to the seed normally, the dove has taken off the lid and dipped its entire upper body into the main part of the feeder, it’s tail feathers spread out its back. idk why I expect more from the “no nest, egg on branch” species. but I love them nonetheless
July 31, 2025 at 6:14 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
O tenderness, I’m walking toward you.

Patrycja Humienik
Ecotones Little birds whose names I don’t know, underbellies a shock of citrus, swoop and flutter. With an ease I envy. Behind my looking is the scene’s competing memory. Ears ringing with uninterrupted sleep. Scrolling Dissociation is one way to survive. Twice daily, the estuary is flooded with salt at high tide. Draining twice a day at low. O tenderness, I’m walking toward you. Why are you pulling away?
July 28, 2025 at 3:57 AM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
got a little childhood chess dream done :)
a picture of my chess.com profile, which shows a rapid rating of 2002, and a chart showing an increase of almost 300 points in the last three months
July 9, 2025 at 5:21 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
Nothing ever absolutely has to happen.

Matt Rasmussen
Chekhov’s Gun Nothing ever absolutely has to happen. The gun doesn’t have to be fired. When our hero sits on the edge of his bed contemplating the pistol on his nightstand, you have to believe he might not use it. Then the theatre is sunk in blackness. The audience is a log waiting to be split open. The faint scuff of feet. Objects are picked up, shuffled away. Other things are put down. Based on the hushed sounds you guess: a bed, some walls, a dresser. You feel everything shift. You sense yourself being picked up, set down. A cone of light cracks overhead. The audience’s eyes flicker toward you like droplets of water.
June 30, 2025 at 7:11 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
working on reading my Tin House group’s packets with my trusty editor
an image of a laptop open to a word processor. Alphonse, the cutest black and white cat in the whole world, is laying by my leg. He eyes are closed in what could be sleepiness, what could be annoyance that my typing has interrupted his sleepiness. One paw turned up exposes his little pink beans
June 27, 2025 at 4:55 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
Charles Wright
Description’s the Art of Something or Other Description is expiation, and not a place to hunker down in. It is a virtual world unfit for the virtuous. It is a coming to terms with. Or coming to terms without. As though whatever we had to say could keep it real. As though our words were flies, and the dead meat kept reappearing.
May 10, 2025 at 1:09 AM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
Emily Dickinson

(sans transcription errors this time)
45 There’s something quieter than sleep Within this inner room! It wears a sprig upon its breast— And will not tell its name. Some touch it, and some kiss it— Some chafe its idle hand— It has a simple gravity I do not understand! I would not weep if I were they— How rude in one to sob! Might scare the quiet fairy Back to her native wood! While simple-hearted neighbors Chat of the “Early dead”— We—prone to periphrasis Remark that Birds have fled!
April 24, 2025 at 6:08 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
I love all the Easter poems I see on my timeline; here is one of mine, published in @moistpoetryjournal.bsky.social
As burgeoning muscles flicker like lowgas streetlamps in the dawn, it’s blooming, boy Girls who dance like slick newborn fawns. So lead me. There’s a moth on your shirt In the closet, a mark on your face: an instruction, my luminous tongue sings Sweet as sin or music, whichever calls your body to move Past me, into the quiet rooms of shame I thought I’d given up. Your abs twin my lips. Believe it: I’ve never had a lover move inside me. If this was our last night uncovered, could you call me by my name? Imagine We’re married: eyes coy behind my bridal veil, your family checking our sheets For blood. But this isn’t a constellation, no myth of harvest gods We’re singing. You lead me well; I lower my head with a smirk & a bow Ties my hands together. Hiding, a memory without a name--our careless dress & dance. Kiss me soft & quiet, an arrow launched from our quivering mortality. Hands Lead us back to the beginning: two boys in a dark room, begging to be made. Holy Never ends safe, you say. We give each other up. Under naked stars, we pray.
April 20, 2025 at 4:39 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
I am very grateful to have a sequence of sonnets in the newest issue of @kenyonreview.bsky.social, alongside some personal heroes. Here is the first:
i. Early morning. Anxiety layers sweat like sediment on my skin. Outside, black bees fly around spiked tea cans danced into the open trash. Last night between laughs the corn of tortilla soup between my friends’ teeth reminded me I didn’t have health insurance. I want revolution. I want an Arnold Palmer & a cool porch. At work, I clean the popcorn & children-shaped candy left between the seats of a movie about war. I weep at times I least expect: washing my face, welcoming my love home after a long day. Afternoon: I try to sleep through the sour sun leaking between the curtains, slurs in a parent’s friend’s mouth. & fail. A frail anxiety layers my outside: a dance between my friends’ rest. I weep my love through the rent’s end’s mouth.
April 16, 2025 at 5:34 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
I should post a poem every day for National Poetry Month

April 7 -- Edward Hirsch
[I Did Not Know The Work Of Mourning] I did not know the work of mourning Is like carrying a bag of cement Up a mountain of night The mountaintop is not in sight Because there is no mountaintop Poor Sisyphus grief I did not know I would struggle Through a ragged underbrush Without an upward path Because there is no path There is only a blunt rock With a river to fall into And Time with its medieval chambers Time with its jagged edges And blunt instruments I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves Though sometimes when I sleep I am with him again And then I wake Poor Sisyphus grief I am not ready for your heaviness Cemented to my body Look closely and you will see Almost everyone carrying bags Of cement on their shoulders That's why it takes courage To get out of bed in the morning And climb into the day
April 8, 2025 at 6:43 AM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
I should post a poem a day for National Poetry Month

April 6 — Eduardo C. Corral
Our Completion, Oil on Wood: Tino Rodriguez, 1999 Before nourishment there must be obedience. In his hands I was a cup overflowing with thirst. Eight ruler of my days, ninth lord of my nights: he thrashed above me, like branches. Once, after weeks of rain, he sliced a potato in half to remind me of the moon. The dark slept in the small of his back. The back of his knees: pale music. We’d crumble the Eucharist and feed it to the pigeons. Sin vergüenza. Escuintle. He Who Makes Things Sprout. In the margins in a book of poems by Emily Dickinson he scribbled: /she had a pocketful of horses//Trojan/ & some of them used/. Often I mistook him for a storyteller when he stood in the rain. A su izquierda, heusos. A su derecha, napa’s de cuero. When I’d yawn, he’d pluck black petals out of my mouth.
April 7, 2025 at 5:07 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
I should post a poem for every day of National Poetry Month

April 5 -- Rick Barot
Tarp I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets under the trees, catching the rain of olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness of the one covering the bad roof of a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color inside the winter’s weeks. Another one took the shape of a pile of bricks underneath. Another flew off the back of a truck, black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air. I have seen the ones under bridges, the forms they make of sleep. I could go on this way until the end of the page, even though what I have in my mind isn’t the thing itself, but the category of belief that sees the thing as a shelter for what is beneath it. There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over a wave. You cannot put a tarp over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken oil well miles under the ocean. There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind that sits in a corner and shreds receipts and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread, whose only recourse is language so approximate it hardly means what it means: He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember her name. He is old. He is ashamed.
April 6, 2025 at 1:06 AM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
I should post a poem a day for every day of National Poetry Month

April 4 -- K Iver
Anti Elegy If you were here the Mississippi would still run south. Would still drop its griefs into the Gulf where our friends would still swim in summer. Water would touch us like water. If you were here the river that is your body would not move magically. While it emptied from the bladder’s headwaters, from tear ducts & pores, public officials would still turn the fact of your body into arguments. You might’ve struck the impos- sible: surgery, a new name, your own boat, & someone beautiful to name it after. Someone beautiful & their baby. From one dormroom landline to another, your wishlist sounded like a fairytale. Like grow- ing a merman’s fin between classes. I thought we were playing pretend when you said Goodnight Tinkerbell & I said the boy’s name you wanted secret. Even then strangers spoke to a boy when speaking to you. That was twenty years ago, the list already a plan, already gliding an undercurrent sprung twenty years before that. If you were here, still drinking cold tea in a cold diner, men in state capitol conference rooms hours down the high- way would still draft bathroom laws for adults. Your mother would still sneak taffeta & silk in your closet of fatigues & say she loved you. I wouldn’t imagine your capillaries reassembling. If you were still dying like the rest of us, I wouldn’t tell a young ghost how far we’ve come as if I believed how far we’ve come was enough. Wouldn’t worry about who else gets more than 27 years. Your body wasn’t a national-average. You wanted more than safety. But I didn’t wake sore in the jaw until I heard the numbers. Until a nation, an entire nation, couldn’t offer an alibi. Missy, my grief is righteous & problematic. It floods the last four walls hold- ing you & begs for time. It hurls absurd reasons from a future: a handful of non-cis film stars human- izing a handful of non-cis characters. Better doctors. My grief says it’s helping but argues only for me. The relief, the micro- second of relief when I achieve the unexpected & hope you find out. This means I forget you’re gone. This makes my grief a loose dam. Still, I talk to water that unrivered your body for dirt. I float fantasies of dirt that holds us up. Longer. I say to the water if you were here, you’d be here.
April 4, 2025 at 9:03 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
I should post a poem a day for National Poetry Month

April 3 — Lauren Badillo Milici
IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING I love a girl who can dance to anything. /If you’re gonna scream, scream with me./ Nothing inside me feels wild. The nicotine turning our fingers into ten yellow moons. I held it under my tongue for as long as I could. /Thanks, sorry, sure./ Only I know the pink light of dawn. I’m the morning, I will become something else entirely.
April 4, 2025 at 2:49 AM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
I should post a poem a day for every day of National Poetry Month

April 2 — Camille Dungy
Nullipara I have learned love rests on the odd assortment of petals. Pick buttercup, pick sweet pea: You love me. You love me. Pick snowdrop: You love me not. What then shall I make of the four valves in your heart? The twin seedpods of your ovaries? You love me not. You cannot love. I dream of the digits, five on each of the hands I am hoping to hold. Your ten toes curl and uncurl through the sea of my unseeing.
April 2, 2025 at 5:04 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
I should post a poem for every day of National Poetry Month

April 1 -- Franny Choi
an image of the poem "We Used Our Words We Used What Words We Had" by Franny Choi we used our words we used what words we had to weld, what words we had we wielded, kneeled, we knelt. & wept we wrung the wet the sweat we wracked our lips we rang for words to ward off sleep to warn to want ourselves. to want the earth we mouthed it wound our vowels until it fit, in fits the earth we mounted roused & rocked we harped we yawned & tried to yawp & tried to fix, affixed, we facted, felt. we fattened fanfared anthemed hammered, felt the words’ worth stagnate, snap in half in heat the wane the melt what words we’d hoarded halved & holey, porous. meanwhile tide still tide. & we: still washed for sounds to mark. & marked.
April 2, 2025 at 1:58 AM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
Carl Phillips
Regime As I took off my clothes, I watched him taking his own off. The sound of rain was for once not the sound of wind shaking the rain steadily loose from a stand of river birch. It’s hard to believe in them, the beautiful colors of extinction; but these are the colors.
March 30, 2025 at 8:05 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
Eve Kenneally
Eve Kenneally Looking Glass Soon the moon will stitch itself away. For the /love/ of god, a story: You could be old or very young. You could have been anything.
March 20, 2025 at 4:32 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
thinking again about this poem by Keith Leonard

"He told me to describe the pain in my chest. / I tried. I couldn't find the words. Not exactly. / Listen, he said, that's where language ends."
an image of Keith Leonard's "Statement of Teaching Philosophy," published in Waxwing My students want certainty. They want it so badly. They respect science and have memorized complex formulas. I don’t know how to tell my students their parents are still just as scared. The bullies get bigger and vaguer and you cannot punch a cloud. I have eulogies for all my loved ones prepared, but cannot include this fact in my lesson plans. The best teacher I ever had told me to meet him at the basketball court. We played pick-up for hours. By the end, I lay panting on the hardwood and couldn’t so much as stand. He told me to describe the pain in my chest. I tried. I couldn’t find the words. Not exactly. /Listen/, he said, /that’s where language ends./
March 14, 2025 at 7:55 PM
jamesolearypoet.bsky.social
“So? So. The moon has its rain-ring auraed around it— / the more that we think we understand, the less we see”

Charles Wright, from “Looking Around”
This do we slide into our disbelief and disaffection, Caught in the weeds and understory of our lives, Bad weather, bad dreams. Proper attention is our refuge now, our perch and our praise. So? So. The moon has its rain-ring auraed around it— The more that we think we understand, the less we see, Back yard becoming an obelisk Of darkness into the sky, no hieroglyphs, no words to the wise.
March 13, 2025 at 7:05 AM