Simeon Berry

For the past 6 years, I have posted a daily poem by someone else on FB and Twitter (and now Threads and Bluesky). Yearly compilations (both consolidated PDFs and individual links with magazines and books) here: simeonberry.com/poem-recommend…

“Is that pain, is that discomfort, is the crying / into the sink, is the nipple falling off in the shower, // or the other that was hanging on by what seemed / to be a thread” —Nicole Callihan (@thebluepitcher), “The Pain Scale” @TerrapinBooks rogueagentjournal.com/ncallihan

“boys/wear V-necks with tight jeans & play music/in bands, smoke weed in the kitchen, controlling/the music, yelling lyrics into a kind/of oblivion” —Carlie Hoffman, “Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen County Community College” thecommononline.org/april-2024-poe…

“we strolled to the corner / Where a fallen angel runs a tavern. / Its only waitress is my great love / Who will die young and by her own hand.” —Charles Simic, “On Thursday”

“The father parks outside the Pleasure Place / but does not turn off the ignition. / Tells his son, I’ll just be a second. An hour later, / is found among the lifelike vaginas” —James Allen Hall, “Fantasy” @FourWayBooks

“My petitioner is interested in sex. / His distinguishing feature is a hibiscus tattoo. / My petitioner’s mother dislikes me. / Her son would never marry someone like me.” —Esther Lin, “Ms. L— Describe Your Petitioner” @hyperallergic @AliceJamesBooks hyperallergic.com/536048/two-poe…

“The other man is left sitting//at the desk with the wine and the headache,/turning an old Ellington side/over in his mind. And over.//He held her like a saxophone/when she was his girl./Her tongue trembling at the reed.” —C.D. Wright, “Alla Breve Loving” poetryfoundation.org/poems/47839/al…

“I write things down / in the spirit of Marcus Aurelius / who said the finest bottle of wine / is just grape juice, passing through the liver, / no matter the beauty of a frothing glass” —@biancastone, “Marcus Aurelius” @Tin_House poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine…

“There is a woman we call Flock of Seagulls / who hangs out with a man we call Liza Minnelli’s Wig / and sometimes, they walk a dog we call The Saint / of Nothing Special” —@KelliAgodon, “The Naming of Things” versedaily.org/2024/thenaming…

“I buy tears at the store for $11.99. When I tilt my head back to drop them in, I see the bottom of God’s shoes. I’m surprised by how dirty and used they are.” —Victoria Chang(@VChangPoet), “Grey Stone II, 1961”

“a pub where One-Eyed Walter is playing an accordion, / while a drunk warbles on a rusty flute, and Janet, the scullery maid, / her sweet soprano like a tiny bird” —Barbara Hamby, “Ode to the Messiah, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Can’t Believe” @pshares

“I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade, / a song for what we did on the floor in the basement // of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought” —@HoweMariehowe, “Practicing”

“In 1902 Paris was still a city of medieval streets—transverse, / Crowded with blind men, prostitutes, tubercular children. / “Here,” he thought, “is what happens. // The evenhandedness of God is a gray thing.” —Stephen Kuusisto, “History in Empty Air” @CopperCanyonPrs

“as unstoppable as a handful of pills / that might kill you on a night like this, / like the night when Marilyn kissed it all goodbye. / It only came up roses after her show closed. / Too bad she had to row, row her boat / in lava lake.” —Ai, “Hoover, Edgar J.”

“Deaf Goya Goya with migraines Goya painting by torchlight / the decrepit old Goya besieged by shadows / Goya in a black mantilla / Goya and failure” —Jane Miller, “A Palace of Pearls” @CopperCanyonPrs

One woman, who made an omelette with a sheet of tin And five spotted quail eggs, Had a voice full of dusk, and jail cells, And birdcalls. She spoke In Spanish to no one, as they all did. Their swearing was specific And polite —Larry Levis “Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Vineyard”

“I think to when we opened cold / on a rain-dark gutter, running gold / with the neon of a drugstore sign, / and I’d read into its blazing line: / forget the ink, the milk, the blood” —Don Paterson, “Rain” newyorker.com/magazine/2008/…

“I have given him a lisp. / Propped on his cane, he flirts with me—Claude Armande Count Amboy. / I have given him a mustache and a cough. / On the arched bridge over the Seine, he betrays you, your steady boyfriend.” —Maureen Howard, “Plagiarism”

Petition for a Terry Pratchett tarot deck: The Five of Hedgehogs, the Eight of Boots, The Unctuous Dibbler, The Fastidious Patrician, The Luggage.