sea salt & words.

my heart - you cannot count on my heart. but the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

[airoehead]

[ironedorchid]

Kelly Link, 21st April 2026

[goldensunset]

per my last desperate howl at the heavens,

[kissed1996]

If you had to sing a child to sleep RIGHT NOW what would you sing and it CANT BE a lullaby it has to be a regular song

[fandom-trash-goblin]

we've got a life to love living.

[rxttingcorpse]

[thememedaddy]

[24x81]

scott hunter watching shane and ilya flirt across the bench: gay rights but only for me I think

[hollanders-left-tit]

Scott:

[letterful]

[letterful]

i do love listmaking…

[letterful]

here be two decidedly incomprehensive lists based on highly arbitrary criteria — off the top of my head and in no particular order:

rattling like a bag of bones:

"gretel, from a sudden clearing" & "the promise" & "what the silence says" & "calvary" by marie howe,

"i watched you disappear” by anya krugovoy silver,

"the song of hen's head" & "this is a photograph of me" & "a sad child" by margaret atwood,

"bruise ghazal" & "i go back to may 1937" by sharon olds,

"harold's leap" & "deeply morbid" & "the orphan reformed" & "do take muriel out" & "not waving but drowning" by stevie smith,

"we who are your closest friends" by phillip lopate,

"the loft" by richard jones,

"eating together" & "death poem" & "party" & "you with the crack running through you" & "the numbers" by kim addonizio,

"thanks" by w. s. merwin,

"the bee meeting" & "lady lazarus" & "daddy" & "sheep in fog" & "fever 103" by sylvia plath,

"yesterday he still looked in my eyes" by marina tsvetaeva,

"we don't know how to say goodbye" & "the last toast" by anna akhmatova,

"unknown girl in the maternity ward" & "lessons in hunger" & "the truth the dead know" by anne sexton,

"anne sexton’s last letter to god" by tracey herd,

"aubade" & "the mower" by philip larkin,

"the blue bowl" by jane kenyon,

"her long illness" by donald hall,

"myth" by natasha trethewey,

"the drowned girl" by bertolt brecht,

"in bertram's garden" by donald justice,

"ovid in the third reich" by geoffrey hill,

"report from a besieged city" by zbigniew herbert,

"napoleon" by miroslav holub,

"me up at does" by e.e. cummings,

"snow line" by john berryman,

"the hollow men" by t. s. eliot,

"dedication" & "in warsaw" by czesław miłosz—

resonating like a bright bell:

"what the living do" & "my dead friends" & "magdalene, afterwards" by marie howe,

"funny" by anna kamieńska,

"woman unborn & "i'll open the window" &  “tomorrow they’ll cut me open” by anna świrszczyńska,

"the book of hours" by b. h. fairchild,

"there is a gold light in certain old paintings" by donald justice,

"when eurydice saw him..." (an excerpt) by gregory orr,

"sometimes, when the light" & "the blind leading the blind" & "there are mornings" & "monet refuses the operation" by lisel mueller,

"try to praise the mutilated world" & "transformation" by adam zagajewski,

"the end and the beginning" & "the tower of babel" & "discovery" & "thank-you note" by wisława szymborska,

"all in green went my love riding" by e. e. cummings,

"while eating a pear" & "the dead" by billy collins,

"never again would the birds' song be the same" by robert frost,

"a meeting" by wendell berry, 

"death at daybreak" by anne reeve aldrich,

"next time" by joyce sutphen,

"the god abandons antony" by c. p. cavafy,

"musee des beaux arts" by w. h. auden,

"failing and flying" by jack gilbert,

"goodtime jesus" by james tate,

"all my friends are finding new beliefs" by christian wiman,

"i’m glad your sickness" by marina tsvetaeva,

"angels" by maurya simon,

"the saints" by margaret atwood,

"dirge without music" by edna st. vincent millay,

"a refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in london" & "fern hill" & "do not go gentle into that good night" & "and death shall have no dominion" by dylan thomas,

"high windows" & "an arundel tomb" by philip larkin,

"please read" by mary ruefle,

"it was not death, for i stood up" by emily dickinson,

"men made out of words" by wallace stevens,

"ash wednesday" by t. s. eliot,

"on angels" & "this world" & "if there is no god" & "encounter" by czesław miłosz.

[offslime]

ID: screenshot of a notesapp title that reads “poems that rattle in my head like a bag of bones & poems that resonate throughout it like a big brass bell” ID end

[letterful]

— WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak.

[apoemaday]

To My Children, Fearing for Them

by Wendell Berry

Terrors are to come. The earth is poisoned with narrow lives. I think of you. What you will live through, or perish by, eats at my heart. What have I done? I need better answers than there are to the pain of coming to see what was done in blindness, loving what I cannot save. Nor, your eyes turning toward me, can I wish your lives unmade though the pain of them is on me.

[lunchboxpoems]

[lunchboxpoems]

ALICE NOTLEY

[apoemaday]

The Day of Our Divorce Hearing

by Ruth Lepson

you treated me to lunch, a spaghetti place. We had never been so kind to each other. When you said I’m still a slob, we laughed. After lunch, we stood in the parking lot. You said, you have the last word, but I said, No, I’m tired of being the one who sums things up. You get the last word. But you couldn’t think of one. So off you went to our silver car, I to our red one. I t’s three years later. And even that’s just a story now. Lately I don’t feel as if I lived with you. But I remember our kindness that day, when it no longer mattered.

[grainyflashes]

one time I used the ben affleck smoking reaction image in the family group chat and my mom replied with the funniest possible response which was: "mommy doesn't know who the guy is???" and that phrase has not left my brain since. I'll see blorbos on my dash that I don't recognize and I'll be like well it seems mommy doesn't know who the guy is.

[epilepticsaints]

[electricpentacle]

Bear in mind that this is a technique that anyone can use on anyone about anything.

For example, you probably want to be suspicious when megacorporations start rebranding themselves as "diverse" and "sustainable".

[starcrossed-sky]

"Vegan leather" replacing "pleather" as the most frequent term for the material, as the greater populace began thinking that anything vegan is good and anything plastic is bad, is another good example if you want something specific.