Laura Minor, poets<poems 😘 she/her 🤘new here 💪 #writer #poetry
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lauralminor.bsky.social
Laura Minor, poets<poems 😘 she/her 🤘new here 💪 #writer #poetry
@lauralminor.bsky.social
5.9K followers 10K following 380 posts
2024 Silver Medal Florida Book Awards, Poetry 🥈

Book 2: Bright Life, Animal Heart, winner of the 2023 Minds on Fire Open Book Prize, out now!, conduit.org

Book 1: Flowers as Mind Control, winner of The 2020 John Ciardi Prize,
at uapress.com
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lauralminor.bsky.social
Jean Valentine 💝
Jean Valentine Door in the Mountain Never ran this hard through the valley never ate so many stars I was carrying a dead deer tied on to my neck and shoulders deer legs hanging in front of me heavy on my chest People are not wanting to let me in Door in the mountain let me in
November 18, 2025 at 8:07 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
This is what it’s like scrolling through poetry socials. 🤣
Eric Wareheim of Tim & Eric comedy. He is gesturing thoughtfully at nothing and the word “poems” is next to him.
November 8, 2025 at 7:52 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
These poems made me feel good today. Maybe they will for you as well. 
THIS MORNING We were the rain last night. our smell still lingers in the flower beds. The white hills rise like crumpled moons; a swarm of insects lights a lawn's dull face. We go to see ourselves in puddles, you and I, clear fragments of the flood. - Bert Meyers "I want to sleep with you elbow to elbow" I want to sleep with you elbow to elbow Hair entwined Genitals enlaced With your mouth as a pillow. I want to sleep with you back to back Without breath to keep us apart Without words to distract us Without eyes to tell lies Without clothes. I want to sleep with you breast to breast Clenched and sweating Glistening from a thousand shivers Consumed by the wild inertia of bliss Splayed on your shadow Pounded by your tongue And to die between. the rotted teeth of a rabbit Contented. -Joyce Mansour Late Air From a magician's midnight sleeve the radio-singers distribute all their love-songs over the dew-wet lawns. And like a fortune-teller's their marrow-piercing guesses are whatever you believe. But on the Navy Yard aerial I find better witnesses for love on summer nights. Five remote red lights keep their nests there; Phoenixes burning quietly, where the dew cannot climb. -Elizabeth Bishop Another Stupid Party I had to stand at the other end of the room and talk to a hundred other people. My longing for him trailed after me and although its nature had not changed, its agency had, as if it were the angel whispering at the back of my head, and if I turned I would see, on the floor behind me, that we held each other, that we kept insisting, always working toward the end of the story, his breath on me the weight of a dream I had in which I kissed him and felt a skittish animal slip in. Tomorrow I'm going to do something about it. -Saskia Hamilton
October 28, 2025 at 9:22 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
Rebecca Wolff 😎
You are perfect for me because you're psychic no one else could understand me the way you do and I say Drink Me I say it to you silently but it calls forth in me the water for you the water you asked for By Rebecca Wolff
October 17, 2025 at 6:42 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
Linda Gregg and Lucille Clifton on the cruelty of life. I don’t have a death lean, but I’ve been thinking about how Kirk Douglas’s mother told him on her death bed, “Don’t be afraid. It happens to everyone.” 🥀🍁🍂💀
ETIOLOGY Cruelty made me. Cruelty and the sweet smelling earth, /and the wet scent of bay. The heave in the rumps /of horses galloping. Heaven forbid that my body not /perish with the rest. I have smelled the rotten wood /after rain and watched maggots writhe on /dead animals. I have lifted the dead owl while it /was still warm. Heaven forbid that I should be saved. cruelty. don't talk to me about cruelty or what I am capable of. when i wanted the roaches dead i wanted them dead and i killed them. i took a broom to their country and smashed and sliced without warning without stopping and i smiled all the time i was doing it. it was a holocaust of roaches, bodies, parts of bodies, red all over the ground. i didn't ask their names. they had no names worth knowing. now i watch myself whenever i enter a room. i never know what i might do.
September 9, 2025 at 7:30 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
I think the only other time I’ve seen this word used recently is in the Alan Dugan poem. 😍✍️
Drunken Memories Of Anne Sexton The first and last time I met my ex-lover Anne Sexton was at a protest poetry reading against some anti-constitutional war in Asia when some academic son of a bitch, to test her reputation as a drunk, gave her a beer glass full of wine after our reading. She drank it all down while staring me full in the face and then said "I don't care what you think, you know," as if I was her ex-what, husband, lover, what? And just as I was just about to say I loved her, I was, what, was, interrupted by my beautiful enemy Galway Kinnell, who said to her "Just as I was told, your eyes, you have one blue, one green" and there they were, the two beautiful poets, staring at each others' beautiful eyes as I drank the lees of her wine.
September 5, 2025 at 3:38 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
or emptied some dull opiate to the drains."
September 4, 2025 at 3:53 AM
lauralminor.bsky.social
I love Bert. O Bert. 😍🤘

Please subscribe to Sean’s incredible poetry newsletter. It’s better than any program. It’s cheap. It also serves as a daily prompt.
Sean Singer Bert Meyers Theme: Sunrise / Daybreak For the full Sharpener set, subscribe at link in bio DAYBREAK Birds drip from the trees. The moon's a little goat over there on the hill; dawn, as blue as her milk, fills the sky's tin pail. The air's so cold a gas station glitters in an ice-cube. The freeway hums like a pipe when the water's on. Streetlights turn off their dew. The sun climbs down from a roof, stops by a house and strikes its long match on a wall, takes out a ring of brass keys and opens every door. Seansingerpoetry.com Instagram.com/the_sharpener_poetry
September 3, 2025 at 4:18 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
🤷‍♀️ I love running into a weird poem that I would never think to write. 🤣
Richard Brautigan I Am Summoned by a Door I am summoned by a door but forgotten by the knock and left standing here alone in a long silent hall, like a marble intestine, that knows my name.
August 31, 2025 at 4:13 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me. -DYLAN THOMAS
August 31, 2025 at 2:33 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
When all the journals open for submissions at once, it feels like a free buffet, open bar, and a community garden all at once.
DONT FORGET TO LOOK AROUNO AND APPRECIATE ALLTHE THINGS GOING RIGHT
August 31, 2025 at 2:01 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
In in Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree ….
Just a picture of Willie Nelson smiling in sunglasses. Picture of shirtless Richard Pryor against the backdrop of the American flag: "I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, I wanna grow up and be a critic." - Richard Pryor 🎼Peaches • Boys Wanna Be Her🎼 POETRY SAVES LIVES BUY A BOOK OF POETRY OR IT'S THE EAGLE OF DEATH (next to my eagle-shaped brass knuckles) “So many tender and painful, sweet and bitter, emotions crowd in my soul—“ - Fyodor Dostoevsky, in a letter to Mikhail Dostoevsky
August 30, 2025 at 2:43 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
I know I’m going to have to poem today, and I’m not excited about this one. I figured it out after a week, and now I have to do it. Fuck ditch-digging. It’s Friday. I want to clown. And, the half-made poem is just ticking under the floorboards. For now … take this. 🤣🤘
I have a hard-on for you the size of Florida. -Robin Williams, The Fisher King
August 29, 2025 at 5:39 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
You took a chance, and realized you are different. 🤗🤘
And somewhere in the darkness, the gambler he broke even Kenny Rogers
August 29, 2025 at 5:32 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
"Why Are Your Poems so Dark?" by Linda Pastan Isn't the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn't the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn't banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask "Why are you sad so often?" Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed. *Source: Poetry Magazine A picture of Linda Pastan smiling in a cozy sweater.
August 25, 2025 at 6:27 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
I’m going through all the papers. 😎🤘
Omotara James [I'm purging and creating ... the numb dumb foot of my birth is circling the room.]-LM Moose / Leaving Philadelphia Cruising up the Vermont mountain the evening I, at the centre of my breaking, do not die, midnight drives my small sedan almost vertical. Atop the icy steep dark, a feeling louder than intuition and more dense than the surrounding fog, gathers. I brake-stretch my heel into the pedal, a chill sits me upright in my seat as the wheels skid to stop. I am at the peak of something greater than my gasp and then nothing. Cold silence. I see two pairs of legs. Heavenwards: belly. A sneeze is all it would take for me, an unabsorbed droplet, to slide past the meniscus of this life into the next. This is it. The feeling you wonder about the whole time. I feel only the numb dumb foot of my birth trembling hard against the metal and the thick pads of my mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's fingers around my neck, steadying me so I do not cross. Before me, always, an entrance
August 25, 2025 at 6:25 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
I ran into a poet I didn’t know yesterday 🥰 They are on their way with two books coming out next year. We discussed the state of poetry and the biz.

In my feeds today, Dean Young seems to address both sides of a good problem.
Do you have any advice for writers/poets working on their craft? The one thing I would suggest to any writer is to read nothing on the internet, avoid all manifestations of the poetry world which has absolutely nothing to do with art. Don't try to be a diplomat, don't be a sell-out to English departments, resist the institutionalization of the art with its attendant frauds and self-interests. Read a lot; do not go to readings. Remember that poetry has been around forever and all you really want to do is be a conduit for it. Also know that poetry in this country has always been the province of the feeble-minded so now is not that unusual. Don't worry about being a poet, just concentrate of writing poems. Don't let social speech turn you into a hashtag ninnie. It all comes through the writing, the doing of it, not the talking about it or receiving vapid sticker stars from hood ornaments. The blood's always fake but you got to try to make the bleeding real. Dean Young DY: Reading poems makes people want to write poems. Some of the biggest compliments I've ever receive about things I've written are that someone has said they read my poem and it made them want to write a poem. Poetry defies the law of supply and demand. Its value is not diminished by the amount available. The more poetry there is, the more poetry there is. There is no limit. Poetry is never saying no to poetry.
August 24, 2025 at 4:04 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
Analog dating. 🥹🥰
THE CONSPIRACY You send me your poems, I'll send you mine. Things tend to awaken even through random communication. Let us suddenly proclaim spring. And jeer at the others, all the others. I will send a picture too if you will send me one of you. - Robert Creeley
August 23, 2025 at 5:34 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
I like this one in the series. And The Art of Recklessness by DY. The Art of Syntax is a little stiff, but I’ll revisit that one again.
Gayl Jones uses a loose version of a blues strophe structure her poem "Deep Song": The blues calling my name. She is singing a deep song. She is singing a deep song. I am human. He calls me crazy. He says, "You must be crazy." I say, "Yes, I'm crazy." He sits with his knees apart. His fly is broken. She is singing a deep song. He smiles. She is singing a deep song. "Yes, I'm crazy. I care about you. I care. I care about you. I care. He lifts his eyebrows. The blues is calling my name. I tell him he'd better do something about his fly. He says something softly. He says something so softly that I can't even hear him. He is a dark man. Sometimes he is a good dark man. Sometimes he is a bad dark man. I love him. “What a strange poem.” Carl Phillips on Gayle Jones Cover of the book THE ART OF DARING Risk, Restlessness, Imagination By CARL PHILLIPS
August 18, 2025 at 4:17 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
🤌
#6 education i am learning the braille of your breath your word your voice leaping up from the page into my mouth -Andrés Montoya
August 16, 2025 at 10:14 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
🥰
I Wage My Life Against Your Body I cannot keep you with me. You must live apart, live far off and die in order to trespass, as the moon is filled with its own story. As music dignifies and represents what we are and want to be. As thistles stand with their blue translations of the sun after the hillside poppies outside Mithymna, windblown over the sea, have gone, have died impossibly of their own blood-red tenderness, and disappeared. The song, the human song of you, is seed impregnating the cypress by the grave. The day focuses the light for a moment just before it ends, just before the sun goes down and evening as always tries to make everything seem all right. -Linda. Gregg
August 15, 2025 at 3:48 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
I don’t usually bother with poems that mention organized religion, but I love this one. YK gets to the rind. 🥰🥹💀
Ode to the Maggot Yusef Komunyakaa Brother of the blowfly & godhead, you work magic Over battlefields, In slabs of bad pork & flophouses. Yes, you Go to the root of all things. You are sound & mathematical. Jesus Christ, you're merciless With the truth. Ontological & lustrous, You cast spells on beggars & kings Behind the stone door of Caesar's tomb Or split trench in a field of ragweed. No decree or creed can outlaw you As you take every living thing apart. Little Master of earth, no one gets to heaven Without going through you first.
August 14, 2025 at 2:08 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
Manguso on divorce with …
How does one, after something like divorce, keep your muscle to trust, so to speak, healthy and strong? Ratajkowski: The first thing that came to mind is this idea from Audre Lorde about female instinct: For each of us women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, "beautiful and tough as chestnut / stanchion against your nightmare of weakness" and of impotence. I believe in the female instinct and have witnessed its silencing. My anxieties and unhappiness and rage and all the things that I experienced in a domestic partnership, I now understand that they existed because I had been ignoring my instincts.
August 10, 2025 at 7:25 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
A picture of poet. Robert Hayden, on a new Us stamp. Those Winter Sundays BY ROBERT HAYDEN Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, hed call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices? On the POETRY FOUNDATION website
August 10, 2025 at 7:14 PM
lauralminor.bsky.social
Love keep us going, even when it’s not there. Creeley knows. 🥰
Robert Creeley The Warning For love—I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the eyes. Love is dead in us if we forget the virtues of an amulet and quick surprise.
August 2, 2025 at 3:53 PM