Tessera

Jacob JB

@jajobi.bsky.social

Ask/Any || No MFA no NYC || Dissenting Missourian || Cellular carbon, nerve bungler, &c. || Seeking sangha || Let’s do a litmag Works: https://www.chillsubs.com/profile/jacob.j.billingsley

301 Posts106 Follower 160 Folgt

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · 19h ago

i still think my name has too many tittles

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · 2d ago

What do you (individual) think. This poem breaks my brain still. I think I'm gonna move some line breaks if it finds a way to the page. porridgemagazine.com/2026/09/30/o...

ONE POEM – Jacob J Billingsley

About as full as a trout hung by its gills in the smokehouse, guts left to bake in the sun

porridgemagazine.com

ALOCASIA @alocasiamag.bsky.social · 2d ago

"Maybe you were meant to be a corpse flower, lying dormant for ten years and smelling awful when you finally wake, but still, crowds of people come from miles away to marvel at you." —Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom :: “For the Chronically Ill” alocasia.org/2025/12/15/e...

Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom :: “For the Chronically Ill” – ALOCASIA

alocasia.org

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · 3d ago

(Don’t) let the cooptation begin

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · 4w ago

Out of season socks patterned with penguins revolve slowly on the rotary washing line —Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki in Porridge: porridgemagazine.com/2026/08/26/o...

ONE POEM – Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki

I get lost in the soft tips of the cedar tree hanging over the fence My parents melt into deckchairs like American cheese

porridgemagazine.com

poemakontsa @poemakontsa.bsky.social · last mo.

One for Charlie Parker. Possibly my favorite jazz poem of all. Charlie Parker, almost like being in love Dionisio D. Martínez There are the shadows of water, when water is thick and no longer transparent.

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

Long may it live thanks to @archive.org! Let me know if you need help making sure your online pieces are permanently saved there. (Short version: Log in and go to slash save.) web.archive.org/web/20210507...

Nat. Brut | Issue Fourteen | Emrys Donaldson

"A Change in the Weather," by Emrys Donaldson. Issue Fourteen of Nat. Brut. (fiction)

web.archive.org

Jacob JB@jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

RIP Nat Brut mag

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

RIP Nat Brut mag

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

The middle of a six-trunked tree at Henry Cowell Park, forming an open vessel. This is full of leaf litter forming humus. Each trunk is completely covered in moss. (Original photo.)

ALOCASIA@alocasiamag.bsky.social · last mo.

"And what becomes of rain returning to crevices. What feeds them to the amplitude of later days and suns. How much nitrogen must then be bought to keep an oak from dying." —Guérin Asante alocasia.org/2023/06/21/g...

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

may all beings be free of war and the causes of war

ANMLY @anmlymag.bsky.social · last mo.

ANMLY wants to read your folio pitches! Want to guest edit a folio for ANMLY? Have a great idea for us? Get in touch! We want to work with you! More: anmly.org/calls/

CALLS – ANMLY

anmly.org

sarah clark (they)@sarahclark.bsky.social · last mo.

essayists can have a little section break, as a treat

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

The neighbor’s son hops a burning fence to save a blue jay.—Huýnh Giffin in @anmlymag.bsky.social anmly.org/ap42/kyla-ye...

Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin – ANMLY

anmly.org

ALOCASIA@alocasiamag.bsky.social · last mo.

Thank you to everyone who applied for this year's ALOCASIA Microgrant for Queer Nature Writers. We're overjoyed to announce this year's recipients, Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin and Chrysanthemum Brook Watkins! We know they will do great things with this support. 🌱✨

Purple floral background. Text reading: The 2026 ALOCASIA Microgrant for Queer Nature Writers. This year's awardees are Kyla-Yến Huỳnh Giffin and Chrysanthemum Brook Watkins. Supported by funding from Accelerate Resilience L.A., a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

“The black, tannic tupelo tea of the stream has almost no perceptible current, so paddle strokes disturb what seems like centuries of silence.” —Watkins on @terrainorg.bsky.social www.terrain.org/2025/nonfict...

Paddling Through Hell: Florida’s Nonbinary Wetlands - Terrain.org

"Paddling Through Hell: Florida’s Nonbinary Wetlands" is a Letter to America by Chrysanthemum Brook Watkins from Tate's Hell State Forest, Florida.

terrain.org

ALOCASIA@alocasiamag.bsky.social · last mo.

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

Consolation in the Forest by Edvard Munch. And a poem by me? And a URL for that which mysteriously refers to someone else?? How modern! porridgemagazine.com/2026/09/30/o...

ONE POEM – Jacob J Billingsley

About as full as a trout hung by its gills in the smokehouse, guts left to bake in the sun

porridgemagazine.com

Raymond Normielib @raymondgibson.bsky.social · last mo.

petrichormag.com/petrichor-31/

Sprachspiel

a man dreams of rain
it is raining outside
rain falls into his dream

suppose he is right
neither crackle of grease
nor so much clapping

his dream-self says aloud
it is raining outside
as he mouths it silently

supposing there is sleep
and two voices between
where did the words go

Raymond Gibson (b. 1980) earned his MFA in creative writing at Florida Atlantic University. Speak, Shade (2013) and Meridian (2016) are both available from Glass Lyre Press, and New Ruin (2020) from Ghost City Press. His verse can be found in Moist, Tiny Wren Lit, and Voicemail Poems.

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

< Winner of the Saturday, October 3 award for Most Freudian Slip

Red Ogre Review @ogre.red · last mo.

Like author readings and new music? We just added the tracks from our October issue to our YouTube channel: youtube.com/playlist?lis... Over 450 tracks! Which means hours of poetry and music in the full channel playlist.

Photograph of a microphone on a red background by Cord Allman (Unsplash.com license).

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

Laurie Greer, senryu, Frogpond (current issue)

mast year
the spent shells
of another shooting

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · 2y ago

You can't towel off with a poem, or land a bee on its shiny surface or shine it through dingy pickle light. —Brian Builta in the new issue of @eldiagram.bsky.social thediagram.com/25_1/builta....

DIAGRAM :: Brian Builta

thediagram.com

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

In the basement a salt shaker army quaking in porcelain... —Brian Builta, in the no-longer-new issue of @ogre.red: ogre.red/issues/2026-...

Knapp Road:

The piled leaves prevent entry to the great hall
where a six-foot Santa greets us
and barely-clad bronze women stand defiant
on tables holding branches and swords
and the chandeliers swing in tune to music
that never plays. Wooden bears chain-sawed
in New Mexico and End of the Trail sculptures
slouch in every room. As the sun rises
above the Guadalupe, axis deer gnaw flora
and produce fauns, riveted by the rush of water.
In the basement a salt shaker army
quaking in porcelain, closed books
with stories to tell, a player piano
playing Begin the Beguine as we stroll
the memory mile, so many of us dead,
so much suffering; not just because the ice cream
comes in impossibly small cups,
but because the butler’s pantry is full
of cobwebs and cups of dust,
not a butler in sight.

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

Let me be clear from this beginning: What I mean by beauty is a terror I have fled from into beauty… —Ava Nathaniel Winter Transgenesis @milkweededitions.bsky.social

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · last mo.

Ava Nathaniel Winter, Transgenesis, 2024, excerpt, title poem, the book dedicated, “For those whose names we have lost”

Selected passage:

We know little of how plants evolve
flush with hormones
useless
except to suppress the growth
of grazing herds, to sustain
a balance I interpret
as the will of a creator—
a creator in whose image,
the Rabbis of the Talmud tell us,
bodies neither male nor female
are made. The saris,
assigned male at birth,
begets no children,
speaks in a voice that might sound
like a man's or a woman's,
and boasts a face smooth and soft
as Rabbi Yohanan's.
There is beauty
in such queer and fruitless bodies.

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · 3mo ago

at a distance it seems to wind Frank O’Hara

Barbizon.

The forest sprang up around me
there in the fertile valley where
I lay nakedly spelling the sleep
of flags. A pulsating swan
shook herself on the long waters.
Did she know the nationalities?
I appeared as a bridge over which
the sky was estimating and establishing
as in a distance the road seems to wind.

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Mikko Harvey from Let The World Have You

Poem:

Microsleep.

A blue
worm works
its way across
the wall.
“Electric
or natural?”
I've noticed
the more you
interrupt
yourself
the more
destinies
you invite
in. “But then
your own boat
gets smaller.” God
visited – she
turned me into
a little flower
and gave me
this job: spy
on the pollen
as it falls
off me. “Does
it seem
happy
to be
leaving?”

Tom Snarsky @tomsnarsky.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Aram Saroyan

POEM

I don’t want to be a seer
And fly through the universe
I just want to be a man
And stay here
And let my time be open
To your time as yours is
Open to mine
And the children grow up
Inside our lives
And the house goes through
Its karma
And friends and neighbors
Successes and failures
Birds and learning
All intertwine within
The daylight and the nighttime
And I look out to see
The same tree
Differently each time

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I try to break their wings but failing wrap them in blankets —Laura Beausoleil Manroot (New Voices Issue) Spring/Summer 1977

Typewritten poem by Laura Beausoleil on a patinated, scanned page:

I dream of
black refrigerators
that are open all night

they make a sound
which I mistake for time

I refuse the noise
like a plate of ash
and tip it out of bed

then

I dream of
hummingbirds
which I mistake for time

they are taking nectar
from my eyes

I try to break their wings
but failing
wrap them in blankets

then

I dream of a sound
I cannot hear

it is time

poemakontsa @poemakontsa.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Oof! 💔

Yahia Lababidi@ysl.bsky.social · 6mo ago

i’ve been praying, and these are what my prayers look like; dear God i come from two countries one is thirsty the other is on fire both need water later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt? it answered everywhere —Warsan Shire

Jacob JB @jajobi.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Conrad Aiken: A letter from Li Po www.jstor.org/stable/25293...

The beginning of section seven of the 13-page poem, A Letter from Li Po:

Why here. Nor can we say why here. The peachtree bough / scrapes on the wall at midnight, the west wind / sculptures the wall of fog that slides / seaward, over the Gulf Stream. The rat / comes through the wainscot, brings to his larder / the twinned acorn and chestnut burr. Our sleep / lights for a moment into dream, the eyes / turn under eyelids for a scene, a scene, / O and the music, too, of landscape lost. / And yet, not lost. For here savannas wave / cressets of pampas, and the kingfisher / binds all that gold with blue. Why here, why here? / Why does the dream keep only this, just this—? / Yes. as the poem or the music do?

Chen Chen @chenchenwrites.bsky.social · 6mo ago

always completely in love with this poem by Rick Barot

Litany
by Rick Barot

When any word is called for, say that I am of.
When the tornado forms, that is the ruinous
kiss. When the bamboo-green field sways,
think of tea. When the vines thicken in
the heat, this is the medusa head consuming
its own stare. When a man committedly
steps to the ledge, this is the daguerreotype’s
cold glass face. When winter, that is hemlock
prominent. When mirror or letter or echo,
these are correspondences. When the snow
is pink, something has been left motherless.
When singing, think of articulating silences.
When stars, history. When the sword-gray,
fatherly rain, this is I have wandered the earth.