Burgi Zenhaeusern

@burgi

Loves books. Writes poems. She/her For everything else, incl. WHITE DOOR order link: PS: DM for signed/review copies Banner: shadows of cast-iron chair & plant on flagstones. Headshot: white woman (long hair, glasses) smiling

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Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· 13d

What an amazing poem and what a rendering of 'ominous'! I'm so happy @mardery.bsky.social chose her gorgeous poetry to tell the stories that fill Level Watch (@juneroadpress.bsky.social, 2025). Just ✨😍✨! #poetry 📚💙

book on wooden surface. The cover shows watercolor landscape by Bronwen McCormick: the art is superimposed on a map and is a painting of hilly pinewoods in foreground and bluish mountains in the back, there is a horizontal burn-mark crossing the sky, like a burnt edge of a sheet of paper. The colors are very light and subdued.

$Little Lost Cove From up on the cliffs, the forest unspools. Gauzy haze in the distance, inscrutable blue that resolves into green up close. Inside those forest corridors, the woods come alive. Creatures watch, camouflaged in the flora, and the leaves begin to feel like fur—one giant animal, one consciousness. The trees bear witness as a woman kneels to pump water from a shallow stream. She startles the minnows awake, and a snake sunning on a nearby rock lifts its head when the fish scatter, fracturing the little trapezoid of light where it trembles on the warming water.$

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· 18d

"I try to calibrate the distances" Leigh Lucas in SPLASHED THINGS (@boa-editions.bsky.social, 2026) matter-of-fact & deeply personal all around wonderful poetry! #poetry 📚💙

the book on a tan wooden surface. The cover shows collage-style shapes that suggest a table, a fallen vase, flying paper sheets, a pencil holder, the back of a sofa, all in subdued colors on nearly black ground.

[Some lines are right-adjusted and some left-adjusted as if two voices in the speaker's head]

I know I am embarrassing myself

I try to calibrate the distances. Art requires careful theatrics.

Yes, be more cold.

Be ventriloquizer. Quoter.

Don't make a feast of cutlery.

Help. Is a beautiful thing to say.

Surrender.

When I had butterflies I couldn't shake he'd scoop me up and lie on top and Squeeze Those Nerves Right Out.

So

what now?

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· 22d

"and whenever I am lost in translation, I peel the metaphor like an orange for you" The beginning of two sequences in Ghayath Almadhoun's I Have Brought You a Severed Hand (Action Books, 2025), translated by Catherine Cobham. 💫✨❤️💚🖤🤍✨💫 #poetryInTranslation 📚💙

The book on a tan wooden surface. Its cover features a stylized yellow hand, held up, palm outward facing, and bleeding (red) from a cuts at the base of its fingers and wrist. In place of a thumb there's a sitting, red figure, handless. The background is black. The lettering is white, red, and yellow, above and below the hand.

How Hope Became Green

Hope means that you fight windmills, not like Don Quixote, no, because he fought windmills believing they were devils with long arms. Hope is when you do exactly what I do, fight windmills knowing perfectly well that they are just windmills.

I have brought you Syria

I have brought you a rose made of concrete that resembles my past days, and dreams stripped of nightmares so you're not afflicted by memories, and whenever I am lost in translation, I peel the metaphor like an orange for you, and hide my poems that suffer from postmodern stress disorder.

I have brought you a severed hand, so you have more hands and fingers of dynamite to point at the homeland, and whenever you light a fire I see it from far, far away and come to you from everywhere, as if you were Mecca, or I were the one who leaves and never returns.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Jul 9

"Throw in the pasta I'm on my way!" 😊 Patrizia Cavalli in My Poems Won't Change The World, selected poems, edited by Gini Alhadeff with translations by various translators/authors (fsg, 2013) #poetryInTranslation

Throw in the pasta, I'm on my way!
O bliss, I'll be fed.
But the water doesn't boil, not yet.
For someone to be there bringing
water to a boil and to get there on time
before the pasta overcooks
or God forbid grows cold,
in that exact always slightly hysterical
moment, yes, in that almost sacred
very moment of straining,
that happy haste sooner or later,
will come to all, even the unluckiest.

Gini Alhadeff [translator]

Butta la pasta, arrivo!
Ah che gioia, mi danno da mangiare.
L'acqua però non bolle, non ancora.
Che qualcuno stia lì a scaldare
l'acqua e poi arrivare in tempo
prima che la pasta scuocia
o che magari sia diventata fredda,
in quel momento esatto sempre
un po' isterico, sì proprio in quel momento
quasi sacro della scolatura,
questa fretta felice pirma o poi,
anche ai più disgraziati, a tutti tocca.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Jul 8

People, I just drafted my first poem in over a year!!! PS: this violet nearly died on me. To faith or a good spot in not too much sun I guess.

Potted, African Violet with one purple blossom

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Jul 2

Watch clouds leak / light, gone faces. // Where the fog lifts— / a mountain dwells. Two poems from Leila Farjami's Daughter of Salt (@triohousepress.org, yesterday 😊). 😍💖🔥💖😍 #poetry 📚💙

the book on a wooden surface. Its cover shows art by Majid Fadaeian. It fills the whole page: drawing in blue ink (?) of stylized landscape with a tree and a long-haired figure wearing loincloths and sitting crosslegged on a stool under it, along the banks of a still body of water with fish jumping out of it. The background maybe sand dunes. Three figures sit in the tree crown. Only their heads are visible. Their faces are identical to the face of the sitting figure below them and look into the same direction.

Daughter of Salt: The Escape

When night claws me,
I run to the sea.

The sea has no use
for a daughter turned salt.

Mother says her god
was blinged by storm—
("Forgive, if you can")

sister says the devil
pleads guilty—
("Forgive, if you can")

Father, you said your father
was an empty plate.

You learned to plead, then kill—
nothing to spare.

For your mercy,
I would never beg.

I hold my breath
like a knife,

flee your lair for cliff-edge
and starlight.

The dawn, too thick—
I may lose my way

Elegy for What's Left

Peer into the gorge—
spears of mist.

Grip the loose rail,
ground slipping.

A waft of wet
before the body's clay.

Watch clouds leak
light, gone faces.

Where the fog lifts—
a mountain dwells.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Jun 28

Just one #smallPoemSunday poem from Horses by Jake Skeets (@milkweededitions.bsky.social, 2026) here. But, I'm telling you, the sequences in this book are something else! Gorgeous & lush & you just have to go & get your hands on this book one way or another! 😍 #poetry 📚💙 @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Searching for truth in the morning

in the east
a cornfield wrinkles a quiet snow
passing ice and hail silk cattle white
beyond the sunflower thread fence
a hilltop of morning
dews the burst line of piñon and big sage

in the cloud place a sky just opened in low blue
never just blue
drawn out by cicada and brome harp and hummingbird
the only truth around here is dark moss damp warm
beneath squash bugs holding light on their backs.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Jun 21

"Or possibly call it the rustle in the dry / wheat that grew wild through / our back field," Love Poem for Naming in Corrie Williamson's SWEET HUSK (@perugiapress.bsky.social, 2014) Loving this poem and this book! 🫶🌱🌳🐦‍⬛🌾🫶 #poetry 📚💙

sweet husk on wooden surface. The cover shows full-page art by Martha K. Iwaski: Mystery of Chaco Canyon, mixed media on raw burlap: a textured plane of shades of aqua with a textured patch of orange tones above a thick line filling the upper right hand quadrant. Title in lower left hand quadrant in lower case black lettering

Love Poem for Naming [some lines are indented]

Find the word for it. Nightly sound
of breath
beside me. Call it a hand

run up and down a length
of taut-skinned tree bark,
poplar, maybe.

Arrowed shape
the old shipmakers
harvested for masts.

Or possibly call it the rustle in the dry
wheat that grew wild through
our back field,

where I built nests when I was small
as I imagined the speechless animals
did, flag leaves

brittle, shush-saying over my head.
Hidden there
just long enough

for my mother to worry. Come to the porch,
dishtowel on her shoulder,
casting

my name over the afternoon.
Keen and honest
as the iron
[continued in next image/ALT text]

[text continued]
bell in the garden. I would
explode from the chaff,
grassy-haired,

a wild grouse. Most nights:
his back.
The moon

turns its white face between the blinds.
If I woke him,
demanded, The moon,

name it, would he say
a bowl of gold butter
on our breakfast table?

The upended shell of earth's silver
turtle twin? No,
I'd replay.

An ivory Viking longship, tipping
into black sea. Your shoulder
blades'

parenthetical. No, this: your body
is the boat, its fine,
slumbered rigging—

that drumming in the keel.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Jun 7

That last line there! And everything before it! 💖 Someone posted about @abbiekiefer.bsky.social's Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024) & I'm still grateful they did. So, here's mine for all & anyone & #smallPoemSunday. #poetry 📚💙 @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

The book on a wooden surface. Its cover features a linen postcard from the 1930s or 40s with a small town night or evening street scene with cars of that era and low buildings of small businesses. It is in color. The title and author name are along the upper and down the right edge.

Revitalization Efforts: St. Mary's

The parish house now a showroom. Caskets propped
open like pianos and an offering of urns, your choice

of finish. Director's desk in the sacristy. Spare suit waiting
where the vestments once hung. They've restored

the floors. Kept the pews. Scrapped the confessional.
Sold the stained glass. The salvage dealer, lapsed

Catholic, brought a truck and latent reverence. Coaxed
out the panels: most of Christ's body, then his thorned,

haloed head. Then Mary of Magdala, fogged
at his feet, and Mary his mother, holding her own hands

in prayer. Anything, anything can come undone.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Jun 4

... to howl a song at that world only to have it bounce back without so much as an echo. The sheer and staggering fact of this is monstrous. Go read! Palestinian (World Poetry, 2024) by Ibrahim Nasrallah, transl. from Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine.

Book opened to the frontispiece. It is by Sliman Mansour, Lonely Olive tree, 2010, oil on canvas and shows a realistic Olive treein gray tones on gray strip with yellowish gray background in a square that fills about a third of the otherwise white page.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Jun 4

Just livid that a poet, any artist really, should keep being forced to pour their art into the perennial genocide of their people just because the world, my world, keeps looking the other way; forced...

Palestinian by Ibrahim Nasrallah on gray/brown triangle-patterned fabric: Title in red, in English and Arabic. Partial silhouette of a tree in orange on yellow forms the background of the cover.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· May 31

What a crescendoing sonnet of a list!! 😍🎶💖 For #smallPoemSunday I give you @joustingsnail.bsky.social's (Reuben Gelley Newman) Give from his 🔥❤️‍🔥🔥 DEAR DEAR, forthcoming (!!!!!) @triohousepress.org. Go get your pre-order in! 📚💙 @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Dear Dear on a multicolored and striped placemat (partially out of frame). Dear Dear is printed in black and white capital letters of different sizes and fills more than the entire upper half of the cover, the author's name, also black and white capitalized letters, the rest. A string instrument's f-hole in black and cut into red wood-texturing constitutes the background.

Give
Jasper Johns, Untitled, Encaustic on linen, 1996

Give me a ma- in the shape of a bird.
Give me a thousand amoebas, pulsing.
Give me blue. Give me a blood-stained postcard.
Give me backwards. Give me everything false.
Give me a flock of dimes, a school of pennies.
Give me two boys made of circles & squares
Kissing. Let it never come to an end.

Let it abstract. Let it grow everywhere.
Let it circle & circle & circle.
Let it speck the ramshackle fire escape.
Let it prick, spackle, grow tense & fickle.
Let it past tense & paper clip & gape.
Let it want, let it let, let let unplanned
Kissing. Let it never come to an end.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· May 31

On Sat. 6/6, 7pm I'll be reading with Sally Toner, Diana Brown, Ryan Effgen, Rajpreet Heir, & Sarah Gray at The 804 Lit Salon. Join us if you're around. I'd love to see you! Thank you, Andrew Bertaina & @ladiwoods.bsky.social for hosting this wonderful series! www.eventbrite.com/e/804-lit-sa...

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· May 26

"On the highest lift of his light wings, a lark reechoes into the great expanse of sky that is a shining shell." @geoffreybabbitt.bsky.social in A GRAIN OF SAND IN LAMBETH (@unvpress.bsky.social, 2025) And what profound reechoing from poet to poet in Babbitt's beautiful poetry!! 💖💫💖 #poetry 📚💙

the book resting on a wooden surface (grayish tan): The cover shows in full Blake's title page illustration (watercolors in muted blues, grays and matte yellow, a reddish tint in places) to his America a Prophecy. It is a full-page cover. The book title is on top meshing with Blake's illustration in font and style, and the author's name at the bottom where Blake's print info would be.

Los's Lark

On the highest lift of his light wings,
a lark reechoes into the great expanse
of sky that is a shining shell.

His throat golds a treadle loom
whose song weaves blue.

The entire bird is its organ of perception.
Blue song builds light wings.

On the highest lift of his light wings,
the lark becomes what he beholds, reechoing the expanse.

The sun's vortex folds into itself.
Working the treadle builds the loom.

Blue looms
in the throat of the lark.

The entire bird is its organ of imagination.
A lark's song builds the bird,
reechoing into sun,
reechoing lark song
into lark.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· May 20

For/Against Summer, a Spell: Valzhyna Mort in The New Yorker today! 💙 #poetry 💙

For/Against Summer, a Spell

Despite the chill in the spine, by the sweat of dust,
by the dew on sorrel, the bile in the buttercup,
in sorrowship dues, in sap, on the spines of pines,
despite the winter of hearts, summer came.

Despite the speech-made wind, summer came,
by the sweat of crickets, the spin of drones,
by tge spat of stomachs, by toot, by the rat-a-tat,
despite the sore-throat roosters, summer came.

Despite the sore-throat swallows and one stone,
despite the planted crosses and flowers cut,
despite the planted crosses and flowers cut,
despite the hush of children, summer came.

Despite the chill of children, summer came,
despite the winter of children, summer came.

Valzhyna Mort

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· May 13

"I aim my walking home / for where the house is and for where the house was and for where the house / could be." @zoeryderwhite.bsky.social in her f a n t a s t i c THE VISIBLE FIELD (@riverriverbooks.bsky.social, 2026). 💖💫💖 Poems to read & read 😍 #poetry 📚💙

The book on a tan wooden surface: the title is in white, boldfaced capitalized lettering and covers the entire cover, up to down, one word at a time. Flowers or grasses make the dual toned (like the negative of a photograph) blue background.

Before

When I was an envelope, I enclosed
a red scrap:
say what you want, you know
what its shape was.

When I was the scrap
I'd never slept
so soundly, had never
been quartered
so close.

Solstice

I want to say I recognize everything, but I don't, not even the house
moving across the yard like a lit ship as I walk back from shutting in the hens.
Not even the hens do I recognize. The noises they make roosting
mean love or comfort or nothing, or, it is time to make these noises
because we can no longer see. I shut the hens in, and the house shifts slowly
over the yard like cruise ships used to ease across rectangles of daylight
at the ends of avenues in Red Hook. I aim my walking home
for where the house is and for where the house was and for where the house
could be. There is no ending up anywhere, even for the cat I buried yesterday.
That digging made me sweat. The cat's weight: a ream of paper
in a closed cardboard box. Teh dark in the box joined the dark in the hole
joined the dark the night made. My friend texts this word: ecliptic,
a noun, the great circle the earth's orbit makes where it intersects
the celelstial sphere. The face of my phone illuminates,
another lit plane. It's getting cold on this slice of sky. In the coop.
one bird's head tucked beneath the next bird's wing. Close quarters.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· May 10

Two poems from @chloeyelenamiller.bsky.social's PERFORATED (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2026) for #smallPoemSunday 😍💖😍 @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Perforated perched on crossed legs (partly visible: pants with gray flower pattern and lower edge of red sweater): the cover photograph was taken by the author and is titled "Trees at La Pietra." It shows the reddish gray and green negative of tree crowns against the sky as seen from below.

Returning Home

Leaf shadows speckle the stucco. I unlock the door. You take my bag. You slice the round loaf, flour on your hands. I mix sea salt, olive oil in this bowl we found in another city. The one with a low river.

There is much to tell you. I ate grilled fish last night. Even after dark, trees lean towards the sun.

My nostalgia

for your childhood smells like gravy
spattering the gas stovetop. And by gravy,
I mean that Italian-American red sauce
with braciole and ribs, fat skimmed
into a glass jar stored under the sink.
And by nostalgia, I mean the stories
you tell with cousins over coffee,
coats piled high on the couch in the next room.
Kids listen, look at black-and-white photos,
search each face for resemblance.
And by stories, I mean what you want to remember.
And by remember, I mean what you try to forget.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· May 3

If ONE of my poems were to "ring the bells that still can ring" I'd be happy. In Teresa Dzieglewicz's SOMETHING SMALL OF HOW TO SEE A RIVER you get a WHOLE book of the beautiful ringing Leonard Cohen sang about. Her poems summon & speak & come from deep communion with others.💖🐦‍🔥💖 #poetry 📚💙

book balanced on crossed legs: cover is white and shows art by Val Eagle Shield: a floral applique design (detail). It is colorful and winds across the cover.

Ochéthi, the Day After the Clearing of Treaty Camp

We've been told 'hundreds of arrests.
Held in dog kennels. Strip searched.'
Told even grandmas, praying
and smoke-haloed from inípi, were thrown
to the ground. Told the pipeline
will cross the road to Cannonball Ranch,
touch the untouched sacred sites
by Wednesday. We've been told
that we lost. Still, the kids

need breakfast. Somehow, the sun rises
over the walk from closed cookshack
to closed cookshack, sky swollen as a bruised
plum, purpling the smoke of the thípis.
In the distance, two women kneel
on the plywood roof of a half-built
house, bodies clad in the fawn-colored
fabric of their Carhartt jumpers, ladders
pawing behind them like restless
cats. They staple a vinyl tarp
to the slight slope. Here's

a list of everything I know: I will find
breakfast. They will cover
the roof. When I walk by the house
again, it will look like a woman, braced
against the October wind, the tarp
a skirt she smooths against her hips.

Confluence [the poem is alternately indented]

here, at this half-ass state park without a sign,
with its cracked concrete bench and triangle of dying
cottonwoods, the Missouri joins the Mississippi,
meeting not like a ballet, or a twisting
of silk scarves, but maybe like construction workers, shaking
hands before a building forever half-built.
And what is there to do now but love this unfinished work
of the river, carrying everything it has ever been
given: snow-melt streams like a cold bandana, circling
its neck, shreds of styrofoam cooler catching
in its teeth, sturgeon eggs blooming with their translucent
tails, nitrates, and phosphates, and soil glittering
with bone, and this single mountain dew bottle
eddying in a green-tinged foam, and the ashes
of Ochéthi, reddening in all of our throats. I sit with my knees
tucked to my chest, listen to the duchs call
each other from either side of what will be
the same water, and River, you and I both know
that despite your dams, you will go on
to grow deadly algae in the Gulf, to feed rich
alluvial plains, shelter alligators and hellbenders and mudpuppies,
to have done to you and to do the most beautiful
and terrible things. We know the word end
is never an end, but always a mouth instead.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Apr 29

"I am woman and I celebrate every crease of my body" part 1 of the poem Mokaya in Mikeas Sánchez's How to Be a Good Savage & Other Poems (@milkweededitions.bsky.social, 2023), tranl. Wendy Call & Shook. 🔥❤️‍🔥🔥 BTW: Milkweed's Seedbank series is something else! Check it out! 😍 #poetryInTranslation 📚💙

the book poised on woolen shawl over crossed legs. The cover is a warm yellow with a red print-design based on a traditional Zoque glyph of what looks like a stylized wildcat. The illustration and the cover design are by Mary Austin Speaker.

The poem in Zoque in a red print:
MOJK'JÄYÄ

Walt Whitman epigraph in Zoque

TUMÄ
Yomo'tzyiä
tese' anhkasäpyatzi äj' nhwyt
tumtumäpä' tzäki'tzäki tujkupä'jinh
anhkasäpyatzi äj' natz'kutyam, äj' nhkasäjkyu'tyam
Mumurampä kipsoki'uy
wurampäre' 'jne'ankä'ram
Yomo'tzyiä tese' anhkasäpyatzi tumtumäpä äj'näpinh'tzajy
juwä' ijtyaju wänyi'ajupä äj' anhuku'is myusoki'utyam
tese' mumurämpä tzame' ore'pänis'nyi'eram ijtyaju äj' aknakomo
tese' mumurämpa kikypskuy ore'yomos'nyi'eram ijtyi'aju äj' tzujomo'

Spanish version on left (in grayscale) and English on right (in black ink):

Mokaya
Walt Whitman epigraph in Spanish

UNO
Soy mujer
y celebro cada pliegue de mi cuerpo
cada minúsculo átomo que me forma
y donde navegan mis dudas y mis esperanzas
Todas las contradicciones son maravillosas
porque me pertenecen
Soy mujer y celebro cada arteria
donde aprisiono los secretos de mi estirpe
y todas las palabras de los ore'pät están en mi boca
y toda la sabiduría de las ore'yomo están [sic] en mi saliva

MOKAYA
I believe in the flesh and the appetites, [...] and each part and tag of me is a miracle—Walt Whitman

ONE

I am woman
and I celebrate every crease of my body
each tiny atom that composes me
where my hopes and doubts flow
All my contradictions are marvelous
because they are mine
I am woman and I celebrate every vein
where I guard my anestors' secrets
every Zoque man's word in my mouth
every Zoque woman's wisdom in my spit.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Apr 19

"I have a gift for mimesis / I've been told." 😊 Ha, yes!!! And what a gift! You all GOT to step into this museum & take a tour (I loved every bit of it!): The Museum of Unnatural Histories by @akwenstrup.bsky.social (@weslpress.bsky.social, 2025) 😍💖😍 #poetry 📚💙 #NationalPoetryMonth

Book balanced on crossed legs: the cover shows textile artwork by Sonya Kelliher-Combs, from "Small Secrets:" an accumulation of finger-caps made of colorful, patterned fabric, some with hair or colored twine stitching. The background is white. Title divided into its parts and author in a grid at bottom.

Excerpt from The Museum of Unnatural Histories HR Guide

[following text is in a box]

Policies and Procedures

IX.

When providing interpretive text for images where the subjects are not named. The Curator of the Museum of Unnatural Histories follows best practices, as outlined below:

1. Wrestle with the naming.
2. Refuse the label anonymous.
3. Ask, without irony, what's left.
4. The naming.
5. Memorize her face.
6. Remember you are a creature
7. soft and tender.
8. remember: names are only part of love.
9. Make an offering.
10. Your struggle is not the offering.
11. The only offering is tenderness.
12. Name once known by those that beheld her.
13. Make an offering.
14. Call her Precious.
15. Call her Beloved.

For further assistance please contact your mom, a close friend, or your mentor. The Department of Policies and Procedures is unavailable for assistance on this matter.

Self-Portrait as Jackson Pollock

You'll need a ladder to see
this one

in its entirety. One
with four steady legs.

The kind that won't
wobble when you stand
on the step below
the top one that warns
you not to step any higher.

You'll need to risk the final step
to see this one.

I don't make the rules.

I only make the mess

that's said to be art
but looks exactly
like a mess.

I have a gift for mimesis,
I've been told.

[the following is in a box and in smaller print]
Before the mind, the heart
resumes
its beating.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Apr 18

The tangents you can launch into while your body is at work taking in signals from its environment, transforming it and you—a two-way flow of connection. I love how @nematode.bsky.social's lyric essays in their Backyard Alchemy @riverriverbooks.bsky.social, 2026) do that! 🐛🌱❤️💫🌱🐛💖 📚💙

The book on a wooden surface. It features a nearly full-cover photo of a totally rusted, opened sardine tin with the title and author (Backyard Alchemy, on life with other creatures in a time of salvage) written into it. The background is dark brown to fit with the rust of the tin.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Apr 10

"The first thing I will do: make / myself indecipherable / to you, for // our understanding / revises a kind of hunger." Let your hunger be revised by @naviyuk.bsky.social's WITH SNOW POURING SOUTHWARD PAST THE WINDOW (@upittpress.bsky.social, 2026) in a way only she can. 💫✨💫 #NationalPoetryMonth

The book "with snow pouring southward past the window" on a wooden surface: the cover art is by Tulluk, "Kubulujuu," 2024, pen on paper. It shows a drawing in black pen on white ground of a bird-angel-figure rising above a stylized sea and an island/iceberg with two stick figures on it (possibly a man and a woman). Seedlike shapes fall from the bird-angel-figure and form a heart-like shape as they do so. The sky is dotted, maybe insinuating constellations. The title forms a half-circle around the figure to its right

Elixirs for words to come

The first thing I will do: make
myself indecipherable
to you, for

our understanding
revises a kind of hunger.

My language has taken on
all manner of smog. I
come to fear:

"I come to fear" the things
that inspire me

in the wake
of our destroyers.

I dream of my dead
peers. I see how they do
not want pretty

things. I know they do
not want me to describe pain

of any kind. They gesture
to the gold dredges
hinging into the earth,

[cont'd on next slide]

they sink down
as gelisol thaws,

as we all slink
down into a kind
of hell.

Let us wash ourselves in those waters.
Let us thirst because we cannot drink them.
Let our mothers tell us of their girlhoods:

the ones they lost when they rolled willow
leaves tight in toilet paper:
smoked not to get high, not to die,

but only to see visions of Mary,
that Mary, who was some kind
of mother.

In which the poems and poets agree that they are the result of choices they have made along the way

The silver of the lake caught
in the net, like a provocation.

The translation under the writing—
"How long have you been running?"

I tried to answer, am still trying. A poem,
too, holds secrets that it cannot tell.

Gone septic from a spider bite, the anger
only troubles like sorrow until it goes away.

"You wish you were home?" Yes. But—
mitiktuq—it came unraveled.

I used to think I preferred to dream
with a man only afdter he bedded me

and then there are the real poems
where the language creates it own tension.

Where the language reminds us
to create a story and to become part of it,

to stay alive until we come back.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Apr 9

And here's the four of us 😊. Reels by Kate Mereand

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Apr 9

It was such a joy to read for this wonderful audience & alongside Sierra Fisher, Nestor Torres & Pamela Chomba at Dupont Underground for their Read the Room Series yesterday! 🥰💖🥰

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Apr 5

"no doubt / the heart is a story / maybe a roar" What a wonderfully mysterious duet these poems & their translation make in WHILE PERCIVAL FELL by Tania Langlais, tranl. Jessica Cuello (Tiger Bark Press, 2025)! 😍 #poetryInTranslation #smallPoemSunday #nationalPoetryMonth 📚💙 @tomsnarsky.bsky.social

book on wooden tablesurface next to two Lindt chocolate bunnies (partially cut-off at upper edge of image). The book cover is in blues and whites. Its lower half is covered in water color waves. The title and author in blue lettering above it in a white "sky." The translator written on the waves in white lettering.

French text on lefthand side, English on righthand side (same on the next two images):

le coer est sans doute
une histoire
au plus un bruit
certains diront : murmure
quelque chose a parlé tout bas
de recommancer les vagues

no doubt
the heart is a story
maybe a roar
some say : murmur
something whispered
so the waves
begin again

elle était belle ta maladresse
comme ton idée du poème
pense á la voix
pense au petit
á la foi
animale surtout :
la répétition nous sauvera

your clumsiness was beautiful
like your idea of a poem
think of voice
think of small
animal
faith above all:
repetition will save us

finissons-en :
pas de message
quelques lésions seulement
la nuit les marteaux
une patience
insoupçonnée
je recommençais pourtant
á trouver de bons titres

let's finish it:
no message
only some lesions
night
hammers
a trusting
patience
I begin again
to find the right words

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Apr 1

"& despite the stars & because of the stars." Two poems from @amorak.bsky.social's new & 💫✨❤️✨💫 collection MOUTH (Cornerstone Press, 2026) Also, read that second poem out loud! 😍 #poetry #bookSky 📚💙 #nationalPoetryMonth

Mouth on lap of someone wearing jeans. The cover features cover art by Erin Schmerr: photographic image at the upper edge of a woman's lower jaw, lips half open and wearing lipstick. Her long, black hair blends into her what seem to be dark brown and gray watery surroundings. Her chin appears to be submerged in them.

Ode to the Seediest Motel in Kentucky

WE find each other here, down the hill from an abandoned mall—
so much space we no longer use.

We have never felt more American.
But we could make this work.

A rootless life.
Dirty carpet & the song of passing traffic.

What if there were no one waiting anywhere?
No home

but hope?
No highway

out of these bodies,
no checkout time,

no exit
but the end of the world?

Up Early, Three Months After Moving to a New State

Walking the dog before sunrise & there are so many stars over Ohio & I'm pretty sure that big one is Jupiter & Orion's Belt is so bright & I lift my eyes & Lift my eyes & reach for the profound & which of course escapes into the dark spaces & between the sky & distance & distance & everyone is so far away & here I think I am supposed to & say how insignificant it all makes me feel & but it's the opposite & I am the center of the motherfucking universe & the hunter watches me & specifically me & it sounds like I'm talking about God & I'm not & I'm talking about & I sleep less here & I am lonely & I'm talking about & you & despite the stars & because of the stars.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Mar 29

I love the meander and the mystery of this poem, and I love, love House of Myth and Necessity by @jasutherland.bsky.social @riverriverbooks.bsky.social, 2026) where it is one among many wonders. #poetry #bookSky 📚💙

House of Myth and Necessity cover: shiny surface. Cover art is an oil painting by Jean-François Pierre Peyron titled Alceste mourante (1785) in tones ranging from bright white to deep, muted red, across browns, beiges and grays. It depicts Alcestis on her side, dead, on a bed, draped in nightshift and sheets. The king bowing at her shoulder, her kids holding on to her from the bedside, and two female figures dressed in gray, faces turned away, one arranging a blanket, the other supporting a child. The cover fills the page and is surrounded, framelike by the lettering of the title and author

Alcestis as a Throat Become a Well

Who
speaks
for me
when I cannot
will I be gently
soothed until
the chilly hands
drop their
fluttering
at the breast
the head
once more
conjoined to body
and air
restored
to lung
and who
will dispel
what choked
me to wherever such
things go the stony
vault
for all ejected
reliquiae

they
ask me what
has happened
and I cannot say
that between my
brain and belly
now there is
a well sunk
by the man
I followed
to the
riverbed
who made me kneel
before
his slick
and stony
vault
until my throat
was sore and
my hands were
limp from
grappling and
my husband
cannot
fathom my
stillness
now or
my refusal

to explain
that the woman
split
in half and fused
again is satisfied
with what her brain
and belly say
to one another
that the well its passage
cleared
swallows all its water

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Mar 29

Cherry blossom tourists mingling with marchers, a kite festival, and signs, signs, signs. The Ntl Mall was busy today. #NoKings DC

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Mar 25

Save the date: #DupontUnderground 's next Read the Room event, featuring Sierra Fisher, Pamela Chomba, Nestor Torres & a thrilled me: 4/8, 6:30pm, 19 Dupont Circle, NW, Washington, D.C. Tickets & info: dupontunderground.org/read-the-room

event poster with cutouts of headshots of four readers, arranged bouquet-like. Three women (presenting), one man (presenting), all smiling, of varied racial origins. The poster says: Laugh, cry (maybe don't scream) but definitely come thru. Read the Room, a poetry series, come out April 8!!, tickets $20. The poster has a red and black background.

Burgi Zenhaeusern@burgi· Mar 20

"Grief, you grumpy mother-in-law," Two poems from @preetivangani.bsky.social's FIFTY MOTHERS (@riverriverbooks.bsky.social, 2026) ✨🔥❤️🐦‍🔥✨ #poetry #bookSky 📚💙