Selby Liebert
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sqliebert.bsky.social
Selby Liebert
@sqliebert.bsky.social
490 followers 790 following 910 posts
(Re)emerging writer in Oregon
Trans 🏳️‍⚧️ Elder Millennial
Coparent of 2 humans
Feeder of 3 cats

she/her, per/pers, they/them
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sqliebert.bsky.social
One from me and one from Carver today for #smallpoemsunday.
WINTER DRIVE The highway is a seam and we are its unraveling. The ocean, when we reach it, is the same color as doubt, gray and endless. Full of whitecaps and cold teeth. We stand in the edge of a cliff, feel the mist, taste salt. We stay anyway. You take my hand, which doesn't solve anything but here we are anyway, solved or unsolved, standing where a continent gives up, where the land says, "I can't, I'm tired of holding things together," but you're still holding my hand. ALL HER LIFE I lay down for a nap. But every time I closed my eyes, mares' tails passed slowly over the Strait toward Canada. And the waves. They rolled up on the beach and then back again. You know I don't dream. But last night I dreamt we were watching a burial at sea. At first I was astonished. And then filled with regret. But you touched my arm and said, "No, it's all right. She was very old, and he'd loved her all her life.
November 9, 2025 at 11:32 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Laika
Sounds of the Satellites
Album art for Laika, Sounds of the Satellites, a black and white space dog in a helmet sits on a moon next to a red rocket.
November 6, 2025 at 2:06 AM
sqliebert.bsky.social
A little feeling for this #smallpoemsunday.
Rehearsal for Surviving Extinction The moon keeps forgetting its lines. I coach it from below: Try the part where you disappear. Everything is practice for ending. The way a plum rots into its own sweetness. What is a breakdown? The moon goes dark without asking permission. The plum doesn't apologize. I reach out in the dark, finding mostly air, mostly future, mostly the shape of myself becoming otherwise. Softly, the moon sings.
November 3, 2025 at 12:17 AM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Imperial Bedroom
Covert art for Imperial Bedroom by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Brightly colored geometric designs with a mostly yellow figure with dark hair.
October 23, 2025 at 11:06 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
A little offering from me for #smallpoemsunday
after rain The mushrooms fruit overnight. I understand: a body learns to bloom in darkness. Half a life pretending to be an oak, or the spiked hull of a chestnut, but all along I was the soft thing pushing up through October's mouth.
October 19, 2025 at 8:31 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Had a dream about a couple. And distance. And life. It felt like a montage of a Raymond Carver story.

Wrote a poem about it from the perspective of one of the characters in it.
some distant breakfast You send a photo of your eggs. I make them plural in my mouth - our eggs, the ones we didn't share; my tea is a twin to yours, a little warmer, a little more south. We don't call. When I imagine your voice, it's soft and quiet, you're laughing at something the room is saying. I'm jealous of your walls, the way they get to hold your sound. I go out shopping in last year's coat, and find the sun a promise someone else made. My hunger lingers, stretches like clouds across the sky. Thin fingers, not much more than water wanting to hold you in the rain. Tomorrow you'll tell me about the grocery store and I'll hold it like a kiss: you, reaching for milk, ordinary as light.
October 11, 2025 at 8:00 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Without downloading any new pics, where are you mentally?
Image from Twin Peaks. Cooper in his suit in the diner with a cup of coffee, talking to Audrey in her sweater and plaid skirt. Subtitle reads, “Well, Audrey, to be perfectly honest, I’m tired and a little on edge.”
October 9, 2025 at 7:14 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
It’s been a while since I’ve done #smallpoemsunday. Here’s one from Amanda Berenguer (tr. Gillian Brassil and Alex Verdolini) and one from me.
(the porcupine) sometimes / there is a closure in the space I occupy / and here / I / suffocate / the light / dark / caught / it bristles / a porcupine / furious / and won't let in the smooth / elegant / oxygen / Haunting Become the moments she thinks of you. Not the obvious ones. 4 AM. Dusk. No, be Tuesday at the bank, the pause between cereal and milk. The breath before she reaches for her phone. Arrive as a question about keys. Manifest in the gap where her sentence changes its mind. Like weather that almost was. Small. Like a moth against her window, unsure if the light is inside or outside.
October 5, 2025 at 4:42 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
I was reading Levertov today, and came across this gem. I think maybe a few people might need these words right now.

“Concurrence”
Poem text: Concurrence Each day's terror, almost a form of boredom-madmen at the wheel and stepping on the gas and the brakes no good- and each day one, sometimes two, morning-glories, faultless, blue, blue sometimes flecked with magenta, each lit from within with the first sunlight.
September 26, 2025 at 6:00 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Take a break if you need. If you’re here, perhaps you need an assortment of pretty things for your timeline.
A trio of warm green hills against a blue sky with pink clouds. A rural scene with a green field, power lines, empty road, and a purple clouded sky. Magnolia bloom. A large white flower against dark greenery. A beach scene. Dark blue ocean against the sandy sore, with rolling waves. Bright blue sky with white clouds.
September 10, 2025 at 11:14 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Hazy coastal day. Lonesome house on a hill.
Distant view of a large house on a hilltop. Apparently surrounded by trees. Hills visible in the background under an overcast sky.
September 2, 2025 at 8:32 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Out for a little walk.
Snagged this slice of summer.
Landscape photograph of a green field, with patches of yellow grass and mounds of blackberry bushes, with trees in multiple shades of green in the background, against a pale blue sky with whispy clouds.
August 6, 2025 at 3:01 AM
sqliebert.bsky.social
More old poems…
One from Maudlin House.
One from Unlost.
THESEUS’ DISTANCE See the map - these pins are me. Stainless anchors, their weighted hooks, hooked to scatterplot events on a plane, not a line. There is no great circle, no calculated best fit to drag me around or niche me. The dots are ways to measure Theseus' distance - the distance between now and before, what is and what it came from. A steel bar, its atoms split and rolled. So many heads thinking this is home; all of them wrong. Home is a finite point, in the middle of the fault-line. LOOMINGS I thought I would have circulation, involuntarily, methodically knocking - striving, pacing, bound, all magnetic, in the great American desert, wedded for ever to the landscape, a hollow trunk, a crucifix within, a vibration. I say I am the sea, I do not mean I have salt or glory. For my part, the archangel Gabriel is content we consign ourselves to perdition: I should now take it into my head to go on a voyage, part of the grand Providence drawn up long ago - wild and distant perils, marvels, wonder, like a hill in the air.
July 21, 2025 at 7:31 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
In a mood. Posting old poems of mine.

Here are a few from some super old issues of Synaesthesia…
SURF Before, you were a marching band, but we were never close, your piccolo so high, a bird, a whistle, a soft breeze, but tonight the TV nurse said "aneurysm", and I thought how they took a bone saw to your dreams, how they scattered your grey in the wet blue of Bar Harbor - you always wanted to go - and how distance doesn't matter so much anymore if I am in a living room and you're a phantom. I pretend sometimes I am there in Maine, and we play telephone, just two shells - conchs, no string between, just endless echoes between my prairie and your coast, and the ocean is blue instead of red sunset in your skull - now the truth is waves are to ashes as bomb is to ghost, and the wheat here rolls like surf, but silent. CANNON Your mouth is a cannon, its perfect O aimed at my battle-scarred lips, and the ball of your tongue connects with mine midair where we combust - the shockwave leaves only a wet echo and the flak of our falling above the concrete trenches where we carved our names. HOW TO EAT A TORNADO You use your hands, the ones that carved runes in the sky with blood orange lightning. Wrestle world-breath - sweet green inhales, exhales, cloudspun tofu, windwhipped seeds. Plant your fearless mouth firmly against the wild blue storm, let it kiss hard your cracked-earth skin, breathe the bitter apocalypse. Finally, swallow.
July 21, 2025 at 5:57 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Some recent flowers that keep blooming despite everything.
Honeysuckle. A dangling crimson bloom revealing tiny white flowers hanging like bells at the bottom. Greenery with more blooms in the background. A dogwood flower. Four white, pointed petals around a spiked, spherical center. Greenery in the background. Flamingo lilies. Two pink, leaf-shaped blooms with protrusions. Greenery in the background. Geraniums. A cluster of bright pink flowers with delicate petals. Greenhouse interior in the background.
June 23, 2025 at 5:21 AM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Once again offering some beauty in an often ugly timeline.
Tiny purple blue alkanet flowers. Bright red torch lilies, white petals at their base, against a field of green. Mock orange flowers with delicate white petals and long fluffy centers. A small group of oxeye daisies. Bright yellow centers surrounded by delicate white petals.
June 13, 2025 at 12:55 AM
sqliebert.bsky.social
White primroses catching some sunlight.
A photograph of a bundle of white primroses. Their petals are thin and heart shaped. They have pale yellow centers. They are lit by golden sunlight.
May 28, 2025 at 9:13 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Sweet little geraniums.
Close photography of a blooming geranium. A bright red bundle of flowers catches the golden sun. Greenery and dark soil in the background.
May 28, 2025 at 3:26 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Went to see American Football play in Portland this weekend with my oldest kiddo along. Like him, most people there weren’t even born when the first album came out. But I loved soaking in the riffs and emo tones that made being a millennial youth great.
Concert photo of five members of American Football, a band, playing in front of a projection screen showing an image of a house. There are two risers on stage that look analogous to parked cars, with pairs of warm lights singing in the dark setting. Concert photo of five members of American Football, a band, playing in front of a projection screen showing an image of a house at night. There are two risers on stage that look analogous to parked cars, with pairs of warm lights singing in the dark setting.
May 27, 2025 at 7:53 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Hello!

I’m a trans, disabled writer/photographer/music nerd.

I love poetry (but am currently focused on a magic horror novella).

Flowers are my favorite things. I shoot a mix of film (Yashica-A) & digital (Olympus PEN E-PL1).

I play piano, and experiment with composition & electronic music.
Martha hears voices coming from the moon. Very quietly, like echoes of flowers stretching over the lawn. She wonders why the world has stopped crying and she hasn't. She tries understanding how death is a silent event. Softly holds palms of earth in her upturned hands. What a terrible thing to be buried in. It looks like grass and feels like childhood. Play-Doh, she remembers. She used to believe her mother was a prophet. Always whispering. Martha is made of words she will never speak aloud. The more she learns about the human heart, the more she believes it is a bomb. Martha wonders if she needs to sell her soul, and how one goes about doing that. Close photograph of a hellebore bloom. A bright purple flower filled with radiating bright yellow anther. More flowers and dark greenery are blurred in the background.
May 20, 2025 at 8:49 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Floral cleanse.
Close up of a pink star-shaped flower bloom with a golden center.
May 9, 2025 at 2:58 AM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Was out yesterday, and the weather was beautiful. Clear, sunny, warm. The earth is green and the countryside is photo-worthy. Tomorrow it rains again. I do love this state.
A rural scene. A thin strip of green fields and darker trees lines the bottom of the image. An old barn with a red roof and worn paint nestles among trees on the left. Above, a wide, clear, bright blue sky.
May 3, 2025 at 2:41 AM
sqliebert.bsky.social
Offseason fairgrounds.

Didn’t get to wander around much, but got a few photos.
A twisted metal sculpture next to a building in a fairground parking lot. A chairlift runs overhead. An empty pavilion building. Telephone pole with wires in the middle of a lot of a single yellow commercial hauler type vehicle is parked. A chairlift runs overhead. Three spires extend towards the cloudy sky. Concrete walls and a set of stairs make the space look a bit like a fortress.
May 3, 2025 at 2:30 AM
sqliebert.bsky.social
“AI Companion”
April 28, 2025 at 5:11 PM
sqliebert.bsky.social
I actually wrote a poem about the turkey vultures that come roost in our trees today.

But until that ever gets published, have a photo. I love these birds.
Turkey vulture. Large bird with brown-trimmed black feathers, red head, and curved white beak, sits on a branch looking at the camera.
April 28, 2025 at 1:39 AM