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Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

icicles dripping, keeping
time with my pulse.
#SaturdayPoem

Leila Chatti
Walking through Provincetown in January, I Fall in Love Again

with my life. The fleece of it
draped silver midair. From the eaves of houses
icicles dripping, keeping
time with my pulse.
(How could I have ever wanted
to cut you out? Bluest
ribbon of my blood
looped around my wrist as if a finger, so as not
to forget—) Through the haze, sun-
break demanding as a child. Messy dayglow on
slush, spilling everywhere like milk.
I pause at the harbor, its broad
clean slate. My cheeks
red as the first day. My feet planted
at the edge, lapped by swash like kisses.

January 10, 2026 at 4:48 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

There should be stars for great wars
like ours. There ought to be awards
and plenty of champagne for the survivors.
#SaturdayPoem

ONE LAST POEM FOR RICHARD

December 24th and we’re through again.
This time for good I know because I didn’t
throw you out — and anyway we waved.
No shoes. No angry doors.
We folded clothes and went
our separate ways.
You left behind that flannel shirt
of yours I liked but remembered to take
your toothbrush. Where are you tonight?
Richard, it’s Christmas Eve again
and old ghosts come back home.
I’m sitting by the Christmas tree
wondering where did we go wrong.
Okay, we didn’t work, and all
memories to tell you the truth aren’t good.
But sometimes there were good times.
Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep
beside me and never dreamed afraid.
There should be stars for great wars
like ours. There ought to be awards
and plenty of champagne for the survivors.
After all the years of degradations,
the several holidays of failure,
there should be something
to commemorate the pain.
Someday we’ll forget that great Brazil disaster.
Till then, Richard, I wish you well.
I wish you love affairs and plenty of hot water,
and women kinder than I treated you.
I forget the reason, but I loved you once,
remember?
Maybe in this season, drunk
and sentimental, I’m willing to admit
a part of me, crazed and kamikaze,
ripe for anarchy, loves still.

SANDRA CISNEROS

December 27, 2025 at 5:38 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

ask the sun:
come back again tomorrow
#SaturdayPoem

What To Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back

by Roseann Lloyd

Find a clean cloth for the kitchen table, the red and blue one
you made that cold winter in Montana. Spread out
your paper and books. Tune the radio to the jazz station.
Look at the bright orange safflowers you found last August—
how well they've held their color next to the black-spotted cat.

Make some egg coffee, in honor of all the people
above the Arctic Circle. Give thanks to the Sufis,
who figured out how to brew coffee
from the dark, bitter beans. Remark
on the joyfulness of your dishes: black and yellow stars.

Reminisce with your lover about the history of this kitchen
where, between bites of cashew stir fry,
you first kissed each other on the mouth. Now that you're hungry,
toast some leftover cornbread, spread it with real butter,
honey from bees that fed on basswood blossoms.

The window is frosted over, but the sun's casting an eye
over all the books. Open your Spanish book.
The season for sleeping is over.
The pots and pans: quiet now, let them be.

It will be a short day.
Sit in the kitchen as long as you can, reading and writing.
At sundown, rub a smidgen of butter
on the western windowsill
to ask the sun:
Come back again tomorrow.

"What To Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back" by Roseann Lloyd, from Because of the Light. © Holy Cow! Press, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

December 20, 2025 at 6:40 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

It’s not that I believe in God:
I believe in light, and deer
#SaturdayPoem

Bob HicokGoing Big
For Hanukkah,
for my wife, I tried putting candles
on the antlers of deer.
It’s not that I believe in God:
I believe in light, and deer,
and a man pulling his weight
in the adaptation of the species.
I believe antlers
the most natural menorah,
in a twelve point buck
glowing in falling snow, in hunters
dropping their rifles to their sides,
in the cool air
cupping our faces in its hands.
To say it didn’t work is to miss
that I got to know how to wait
for deer, which is different
than waiting for bear, or love,
or a phrase of sufficient tenderness
to capture the evanescence of life
to arrive, and last beyond the feeling
nothing lasts.
Light lasts.
Light runs and runs
without tiring or giving up, the universe
is bigger now, and now, and now,
just as intimacy grows
when my wife lights candles
with a scarf over her head,
holds her hands up to the light
while repeating a prayer
repeated millions of times,
adding to the distance
the words have traveled
and the complicated life
they’ve lived, and better still,
reminding me there’s a bloom
in her face only I can see
in this light, so yes,
I know what luck is.

December 13, 2025 at 2:49 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

We got the dog to say I love you.
#SaturdayPoem

Amanda Maret Scharf

We got the dog

to get us out of bed, out
of the house, to stop
our unhealthy relationship
with Petfinder, Adopt-a-Pet, and Craigslist
but not to stop our imagined lives,
the endless scroll of Redfin, Zillow, and Trulia. Location: unaffordable. View:
Impossible. To go to puppy school on Sundays,
where the trainer says Sit, No, Break. Says
I love you guys, but you two are so gay.
We got the dog to teach us
patience, perspective, because when I get
sad I get sad. To mop the kitchen
with her snout. Here, I point, and here:
the floorboards, my toes, the couch. Now,
I drop crumbs without caring, and you
write her name into songs about the sun. So that we can say
we live here. After our neighbors had a baby. After my cousin
had a baby. After they had another baby and named
me godmother. We got the dog to say I love you. So that you
could ask her on the kitchen floor if she remembers
her mother, which makes me think of yours in the gold frame
by your side of the bed, except hers is living
somewhere on a farm in Tennessee. So we could say ridiculous things
like look at her breathing! To say look at us. To say
she looks like you. So I can tell you no, clearly, she has your eyes.

December 6, 2025 at 1:43 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

free in time but not from it,
here in the city the living make together, and make and unmake over and over

#SaturdayPoem

Slant
By Suji Kwock Kim
If the angle of an eye is all,
the slant of hope, the slant of dreaming, according to each life,
what is the light of this city,
light of Lady Liberty, possessor of the most famous armpit in the world,
light of the lovers on Chinese soap operas, throwing BBQ’d ducks at each other
with that live-it-up-while-you’re-young, Woo Me kind of love,
light of the old men sitting on crates outside geegaw shops
selling dried seahorses & plastic Temples of Heaven,
light of the Ying ‘n’ Yang Junk Palace,
light of the Golden Phoenix Hair Salon, light of Wig-o-ramas,
light of the suntanners in Central Park turning over like rotisserie chickens sizzling on a spit,
light of the Pluck U & Gone with the Wings fried-chicken shops,
the parking-meter-leaners, the Glamazons,
the oglers wearing fern-wilting quantities of cologne, strutting, trash-talking, glorious:
the immigrants, the refugees, the peddlars, stockbrokers and janitors, stenographers and cooks,
all of us making and unmaking ourselves,
hurrying forwards, toward who we’ll become, one way only, one life only:
free in time but not from it,
here in the city the living make together, and make and unmake over and over
Quick, quick, ask heaven of it, of every mortal relation,
feeling that is fleeing,
for what would the heart be without a heaven to set it on?
I can’t help thinking no word will ever be as full of life as this world,
I can’t help thinking of thanks.

November 29, 2025 at 9:47 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

Where would I like to be in five
years, someone asks—& what
can I tell them?
#SaturdayPoem

Jeremy Radin
Evening

Another word I love is evening
for the balance it implies, balance
being something I struggle with.
I suppose I would like to be more
a planet, turning in & out of light
It comes down again to polarities,
equilibrium. Evening. The moths
take the place of the butterflies,
owls the place of hawks, coyotes
for dogs, stillness for business,
& the great sorrow of brightness
makes way for its own sorrow.
Everything dances with its strict
negation, & I like that. I have no
choice but to like that. Systems
are evening out all around us—
even now, as we kneel before
a new & ruthless circumstance.
Where would I like to be in five
years, someone asks—& what
can I tell them? Surrendering
with grace to the evening, with
as much grace as I can muster
to the circumstance of darkness,
which is only something else
that does not stay.

November 22, 2025 at 11:22 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

Everything you did was beautiful,

even betrayal.

#SaturdayPoem

Mickie Kennedy

Finding My Boyfriend in Bed with a Stranger, 1993

A safety pin through the guy's ear
catching light. His hair dyed black,
his ass barely there, frenetically pumping.
Beneath him, you looked

gorgeous. Lacquered in sweat. Eyes shut.
Feet hooked around his bony neck, so lost
you didn't see me by the window.
Everything you did was beautiful,

even betrayal. Your lips quivering,
as if you were reciting a private rosary.
Even then, I knew I wanted

to remember you like that--face slack,
no guilt, no fear. So soon
we'd be checking our mouths for sores.

November 15, 2025 at 6:04 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry
(and wheat and evil and insects and love),
#SaturdayPoem

Mary Ruefle

Kiss of the Sun

If, as they say, poetry is a sign of something
among people, then let this be prearranged now,
between us, while we are still peoples: that
at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry
(and wheat and evil and insects and love),
when the entire human race gathers in the flesh,
reconstituted down to the infant's tiniest fold
and littlest nail, I will be standing at the edge
of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you,
reconstituted down to its innermost seed protected
by white thread, in case you are thirsty, which
does not at this time seem like such a wild guess,
and though there will be no poetry between us then,
at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas,
I hope you will take it, and remember on earth
I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw,
and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd
or anything else so that I am of it,
I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.

November 8, 2025 at 7:17 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over
#SaturdayPoem

Reasons to Survive November
Tony Hoagland

November like a train wreck—
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.

The sky is a thick, cold gauze—
but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.

—Or maybe I’ll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.

I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.

November 1, 2025 at 12:02 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook
of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed
anyone.

#SaturdayPoem

Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem
Bob Hicok

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what’s happening,

it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn’t hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother’s belly
she had to scream out.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

October 25, 2025 at 6:13 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

I pull each pale seed from its entanglement.
& because I want a violence
more intimate, I do this with my hands
#SaturdayPoem

Padraig Regan
A Pumpkin

With effort I get the knife in, & with
a little hinging of the wrist, I split
the fruit along a shallow runnel
where its form suggests it wants to split.
It exposes its creamy interior.
Its flesh, like all flesh, is a distraction;
it wraps around an orange mess
of filaments. I scoop this out, I pull
each pale seed from its entanglement.
& because I want a violence
more intimate, I do this with my hands
& feel its wet potential turn to pulp
beneath my nails. By now the fruit
is more the absence of itself:
an orange cup enclosing what it’s lost.
There are many things I should confess.
To begin with: this vicious sympathy,
this want (& inability) to know
how it feels to hold a space
at the centre oneself, & have it filled;
to bend the self around the presence
of something not-quite-other, not-quite-I;
to give the body up as nourishment.
I cut the pumpkin’s two bright domes
to crescent moons. I do this in the hope
that when the resurrection comes,
everything I have subjected thus
will be returned inviolate
& I’ll be nothing & forgiven.

October 18, 2025 at 3:54 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

You know what, I'm traveling and don't feel like trying to get my gigantic master document of poetry to load on my phone to pick one and also my head hurts, so how about for this week's #SaturdayPoem we flip and you all link me some of YOUR favorite poems. Go.

October 11, 2025 at 3:50 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

night falls swiftly, tucking us in her black velvet robe,
the stitches showing through
#SaturdayPoem

Equinox

by Barbara Crooker

Another October. The maples have done their slick trick
of turning yellow almost overnight; summer’s hazy skies
are cobalt blue. My friend has come in from the West,
where it’s been a year of no mercy: chemotherapy, bone
marrow transplant, more chemotherapy, and her hair
came out in fistfuls, twice. Bald as a pumpkin.
And then, the surgeon’s knife.
But she’s come through it all, annealed by fire,
calm settled in her bones like the morning mist in valleys
and low places, and her hair’s returned, glossy
as a horse chestnut kept in a shirt pocket.
Today a red fox ran down through the corn stubble;
he vanished like smoke. I want to praise things
that cannot last. The scarlet and orange leaves
are already gone, blown down by a cold rain,
crushed and trampled. They rise again in leaf meal
and wood smoke. The Great Blue Heron’s returned to the pond,
settles in the reeds like a steady flame.
Geese cut a wedge out of the sky, drag the gray days
behind them like a skein of old wool.
I want to praise everything brief and finite.
Overhead, the Pleiades fall into place; Orion rises.
Great Horned Owls muffle the night with their calls;
night falls swiftly, tucking us in her black velvet robe,
the stitches showing through, all those little lights,
our little lives, rising and falling.

October 4, 2025 at 4:42 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

Actually, we're upping this one again for this week's #SaturdayPoem - we're a few days off but close enough. <3

Slippy @damnslippy.slippy.me · Oct 12

A #SaturdayPoem for the date.

Ne’ilah
By Marge Piercy
The hinge of the year
the great gates opening
and then slowly slowly
closing on us.

I always imagine those gates
hanging over the ocean
fiery over the stone grey
waters of evening.

We cast what we must
change about ourselves
onto the waters flowing
to the sea. The sins,

errors, bad habits, whatever
you call them, dissolve.
When I was little I cried
out I! I! I! I want, I want.

Older, I feel less important,
a worker bee in the hive
of history, miles of hard
labor to make my sweetness.

The gates are closing
The light is failing
I kneel before what I love
imploring that it may live.

So much breaks, wears
down, fails in us. We must
forgive our broken promises—
their sharp shards in our hands.

September 27, 2025 at 6:49 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

I will round up a few of the ones I love that are too long to use in #SaturdayPoem posts but you’ll find a lot of my shorter faves there. (And if you REALLY want some poems I can DM you my poetry master file.)

September 21, 2025 at 2:47 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
#SaturdayPoem

“Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness” by Franny Choi

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.

The day A. died, the sun was brighter than any sun.
I answered the phone, and a channel opened
between my stupid head and heaven, or what was left of it. The blankness
stared back; and I made sound after sound with my blood-wet gullet.
O unsayable—O tender and divine unsayable, I knew you then:
you line straight to the planet’s calamitous core; you moment moment moment;
you intimate abyss I called sister for a good reason.

When the Bad Thing happened, I saw every blade.
And every year I find out what they’ve done to us, I shed another skin.
I get closer to open air; true north.

Lord, if I say Bless the cold water you throw on my face,
does that make me a costume party. Am I greedy for comfort
if I ask you not to kill my friends; if I beg you to press
your heel against my throat—not enough to ruin me,
but just so—just so I can almost see your face—

September 20, 2025 at 1:39 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

Maybe this: the sky opens, you kneel
and beg its mercy

#SaturdayPoem

Caylin Capra-Thomas

Lightning Suspected in Death of Horses

I want to take you to the black-mud spring pasture
where six horses fell and did not get back up.
I don’t know if they were dark or dappled—
I wasn’t there. I read it in a newspaper in Vermont,
sitting at the counter of a diner that no
longer exists. Lightning Suspected in Deaths of Horses—
small article in a bottom corner, not much
more information than that. It struck me—
I’m not trying to be funny—I carried
that headline around until it became a slogan,
although I’m not sure what I’d been sold.
Maybe this: the sky opens, you kneel
and beg its mercy, and it doesn’t make
one lick of difference. Or maybe, light appears
and your life is transformed. Finally getting
exactly what you asked for all along:
a shift in luck, sudden brilliance, your body
lit, electric, your own enough to let it go.

September 13, 2025 at 12:37 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

The first day it feels like Fall
I want to tell my secrets
recklessly until there is nothing
you don’t know that would make
your heart change years from now.

#SaturdayPoem

Midwest Eclogue

The first day it feels like Fall
I want to tell my secrets
recklessly until there is nothing
you don’t know that would make
your heart change years from now.
How foolish we are to believe
we might outlive this distance.
I don’t know the names for things
in the prairie, where the expanse
of light and the hissing of tall stalks
makes me move slowly,
like in another country before
I must share it with anyone.
In what do you believe?
In September’s slight motion
of particulars, in the weight of birds,
in lust, propulsion, maps
that lie. You should not have loved
me. Now: goldenrod, prairie-clover,
the ovate-leafted bluebell with its open
throat, saying how did you expect
to feel? The colonies of prairie-smoke
and pods turning golden and papery,
the grassy plains iterating patience,
and things I cannot name.
Begin with apples reddening.
Begin with a woman touching
the cities in your feet. Hartford,
Anchorage, the Bronx. Did you ever
see yourself as more
than yourself? I walk into a part
of afternoon that deepens
inventing an endpoint
for sadness. Everyone is gone.
On the subject of deception,
where do you stand? There’s a chill
in the air and the flowers know,
the goddamned flowers, their loosed
color. Sometimes we are cruel
and we mean it. We author the house
with its threadbare linens, the false
miniatures of people saying look at me.
Will the landscape forgive you?
Is it yours to describe? What
is the sound inside your mouth?
I’m surrounded by grasslands
in every direction. The sound
is a clamoring, because desire
is never singular and we want it
this way. We want it easy.
I have already let go
of summer. Here, the wind-
dispersal of seed and story. Love,
there are things I cannot name.

Stacie Cassarino

September 6, 2025 at 3:15 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

just this once we'll make an exception to #SaturdayPoem and also post about poetry on Sunday because: incredible

www.chinese-poems.com/d47.html

thehoyden @thehoyden.bsky.social · Aug 31

For Reasons, I am currently neck deep in reading translations of Chinese poetry involving orioles. I had a very nice time reading a poem by Du Fu, and then burst out laughing when, after the explanatory text, the website informed me I could read this banger (also by Du Fu):

Many People Come to Visit and Bring Wine After I Fell Off My Horse, Drunk

August 31, 2025 at 3:00 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

my partner and I spend most of our time
on earth feeding one another citrus fruits
and enough strength to go on.
#SaturdayPoem

My partner wants me to write them a poem about Sheryl Crow
By Kayleb Rae Candrilli
but all I want to do is marry them on a beach

that refuses to take itself too seriously.

So much of our lives has been serious.

Over time, I’ve learned that love is most astonishing

when it persists after learning where we come from.

When I bring my partner to my childhood home

it is all bullets and needles and trash bags held

at arm’s length. It is my estranged father’s damp

bed of cardboard and cigar boxes filled

with gauze and tarnished spoons. It is hard

to clean a home, but it is harder to clean

the memory of it. When I was young, my

father would light lavender candles and shoot

up. Now, my partner and I light a fire that will

burn all traces of the family that lived here.

Black plastic smoke curdles up, and loose bullets

discharge in the flames. My partner holds

my hand as gunfire rings through

the birch trees. Though this is almost

beautiful, it is not. And if I’m being honest,

my partner and I spend most of our time

on earth feeding one another citrus fruits

and enough strength to go on. Every morning

I pack them half a grapefruit and some sugar.

And they tell me it’s just sweet enough.

August 30, 2025 at 6:17 PM

Slippy

@damnslippy.slippy.me

only allowing another body to interrupt long enough for
our limbs to tangle like weeds up the side of a brick house,
reaching for something impossible
#SaturdayPoem