Selby Liebert

@sqliebert.bsky.social

618 Followers 798 Following

Trans 🏳️‍⚧️ (she/her, per/pers, they/them) Oregon Poetry and fiction Photography, music, history sometimes Website: willowloom.online

A photograph of a paper boat made of wire moving in water
Evening-Morning The moon-mast has rotted, and the sail crinkled. A seagull sails drunkenly over the sea. The thick cube of dock looks charred. Bushes crouch down in the dark. On the doorstep. The sunrise pushes again and again through the gray stone-gates of the ocean, and the sun sparkles near the earth. Half-suffocated summer gods grope in the sea mist.
To Waste My Hands Three years ago, I stood on the dock near my father's house while the small shark suffocated & was killed. He was like an angel culled up from the purple sea. & the air smashed into him like an anvil & his muscles sank desperately into the ribs. Terrible terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible to watch him that way. More terrible to waste my hands, just standing.
filling The phlox doesn't ask permission, those little white flowers grow into any wound of the stone and make it home. Spreading quietly, patiently, filling the space between root and sun. Something is always being transformed here: water into fruit, seed into softness, an ordinary afternoon into something to be held.
HONDO IRIS FARM IS CLOSED, I GUESS Highway 70, west of Roswell opens like a green eye in the desert, filled with wet color. Agave wider than a child's wingspan, stabbing toward the sky, iris stalks reaching for the sun, which is everywhere, purple and yellow and pink, soft, the scent of water lingering as a thousand blooms breathe. I was going to tell you: there is a place where the desert just gives sometimes, digs the word oasis up from its roots and hands it to you dripping, still alive.
In Bed A tulip bulb doesn't know winter, no, her little heart knows time. And so, she waits, balled up in cold patience, rehearsing the red, remembering what it it is to open under the sun and stars and rain, remembering the world keeps ending and ending, and she will grow anyway, keep taking her pills, keep dreaming, and then, one morning, after breakfast, start stretching toward the light. Her hands getting dirty. She will not care. Look, the whole sky will bloom. And her.
IT'S TODAY, AGAIN Everything is connected, but nothing is working. The rhododendrons, for instance, unexpected purple, sending you back to bull thistles in another state where even April can sweat through its shirt, the low places filled with water, frogs, turtles. Dragonflies, iridescent, clinging to each other in the reeds like they know something about brevity and passion, how wings reflect sun in the sunlight, absence in the shadows. You are learning a woman the way April learns a field, how she wants to be kissed, captured, pinned and preserved, photographed, sepia toned. The desert before it knows what it's about to do, a flat patience, inside a two week long explosion that comes every year, before the brightness of summer and the yellow of Spanish broom reminding you of forsythia and the geese that went overhead this morning, one bad wheel on a shopping cart, already somewhere else| by the time you look up. The road stretches between the softball tournament and home and the place by the river where you stopped for Blue Moon ice cream, dish soap blue, dish soap taste that also carries bubblegum and joy without knowing what's ahead. You ask Am I doing it right? The rhododendrons blush and open, like you, like the woman, in complete silence. You photograph them anyway. The cruise control holds and then releases. You step on the gas, you see, it doesn't matter. You're still going somewhere.
HOW AN EMPTY DREAM IS FILLED The last centimeter of air between us forgets which of us is warm. Your breath unlocks something inside me I forgot was designed to open. Your mouth a small explosion I lean into. Soft. Then less soft. My hands cup the small of your back like I am holding something that could spill.
Photo of some Cape Marguerite flowers. Dark purple and yellow centers with white petals that have purple tips.
Handles We give sparrows the ranks of soldiers even say come back red fox that's the one victor say quickly simon move move move It's four a.m. in the desert on psilocybin Fancy we say on the double Roger we say Out
Science We were trying to refind the eye & brain we had when we were pelicans, but the wind came down, it had ten hands, it had more mouths & took & took us far to sea. The wind was not a fixing wind, not a fixing wind who painted the door or fed the goats when we were sleeping. It took us apart with its blue hands, this piece, this piece— & delivered us to our simultaneous homes. One home is there! One home is there! It said, You have been this small before. Though you can't really remember it, you were not always, always tall, small, small thing, plural thing—
THE PORTABLE SHRINE Gather the bones and pile them near the aspen, still in leaf. A clavicle, a dozen fetlocks, a few big as your knee, a thousand-pound animal reduced to what you can easily carry. Some days there will be beer cans, underwear from a fling. There must be forgiveness, a clearing, a space swept of debris. Taking and giving, a crucial part of the portable shrine. Focus. You must pause to do so, which means you come alone, the bitter breakfast tea still on your tongue. In your toolkit: a three-foot plume of purple fireweed gone to smoke and seed. A book of matches, perhaps a bell. The bell can be a cowbell, wind chimes, or the tap of two stones, soft as the bald path you've worn between your house and a loved one's. Add incense, candles, or ashes from a stove. Yes, ashes, no matter whose, will build one. Remember the old world is site-specific. Place a rock in a shallow stream. See how many more you can balance atop it. Hold your breath like a robin's egg, as if you were a nest, entrusted with all things smooth, blue, and oval. The last night you were at your mother's house, unable to sleep, you took photos of her kitchen cabinets, her pillbox, her matching towels, printed with flowers and leaves. There are shrines we leave behind us, un-portable shrines. Set a flag blowing in the wind, bow to the moon in the west, where the herbalists rub its skin with oil of pine. But know there are places you can approach only in the mind.
THE EARTH'S NUCLEUS This dirtball invites me to think "with" not "for" it. I display a desperation spoken straight from my feet. Should I hear you cry, I wouldn't think before I dropped my glove to find you; that's how dirt thinks. Why the ear, the shape of longing, why the endless whorl you came from? Seeing air doesn't mean it sees you back. The latest molecule might travel far enough to hide you underground for good. Even while we stare the season down, worlds pour like symptoms of its greedy polished joy.
THE TELEPHONE "When I was just as far as I could walk From here to-day, There was an hour All still When leaning with my head against a flower I heard you talk. Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say— You spoke from that flower on the window sill— Do you remember what it was you said?" "First tell me what it was you thought you heard." "Having found the flower and driven a bee away, I leaned my head, And holding by the stalk, I listened and I thought I caught the word— What was it? Did you call me by my name? Or did you say— Someone said 'Come'-I heard it as I bowed." "I may have thought as much, but not aloud." "Well, so I came."
APRIL PROMPTS 1. write a poem that begins with an animal watching you 2. something you kept that doesn't belong to you 3. driving through a town you used to know in the dark 4. write a poem addressed to a body of water 5. that time the light changed 6. what she meant when she said "nice" 7. write a poem about a word you stopped using when someone left 8. the etiquette of vanishing 9. women who name their cars 10. "Does this go faster?" 11. the hazards of mercy 12. sometimes I feel human 13. what are you superstitious about? and yes, you are. 14. remember a specific moment. write about the hour or two preceding that event, not the event itself. 15. pinkie promises 16. mourn a particular sunrise. what was lost in the daylight? 17. love poem from inside a parked car 18. write a poem to your worst enemy 19. the contents of a drawer you refuse to clean out 20. aftertaste 21. where does your confidence come from? 22. something gentle that learned to be feral 23. write a poem about the strangest place you've cried. focus on the location more than the reason. 24. "Do one thing that scares you every day until you die." 25. two truths about the same summer 26. "There are wrecking balls inside us." 27. write a poem that ends with a door 28. "better" as a myth 29. a response poem to another poem you've written this month, or earlier 30. peace offering
Selfie of Selby, a white woman with blue eyes, glasses, and dirty blonde hair. She is a couple months into transition, wearing an athletic shirt, a plaid over shirt, and a denim baseball cap. She is trying to look casual and cool despite massive insecurity that is clear in her face.
Sonnet Caught-the bubble in the spirit-level, a creature divided; and the compass needle wobbling and wavering, undecided. Freed—-the broken thermometer's mercury running away; and the rainbow-bird from the narrow bevel of the empty mirror, flying wherever it feels like, gay! 1979
Book cover. Clean and minimal design. Typography based design for The Colossus and Other Poems by Sylvia Plath. The cover is cream with alternating rust and navy lettering for the word COLOSSUS, with the letters stretched down to cover the entire page, and the subtitle and author information at the bottom in that creamy text.
Hank. A striped kitty being silly on a chair.
This is just to say I have no idea how much of this is true. It's not good to have a conversation. I don't like having a bad day. I would rather be alone with you. The world will never be a place where we can live.
Selby. A white woman with shoulder length brunette hair. She is wearing pink glasses, a green shirt and floral jacket, along with a silver necklace. She is smiling a little.
On What Would've Been Your 40th In the field where we lay naming clouds, you said "That one looks like a secret," and I said, "Yes," and kept it. I am sorry. I have spent my whole life unlearning the kind of quiet we learned together. You had songs in your heart and a darkness you were loyal to, like the sky has weather and night. Look. The clouds are all still there. One looks silver, like laughter. I wish you could see it.
Spring Comes Back But Never the Same Way Twice Once: pussy willows, which are not cats, are not willows but something soft refusing to be one thing. I touched them. They let me. Once: crocuses pushed through snow, purple and furious. Beautiful and done apologizing. The lake ice broke into new geometries. Once: mistook birdsong for a car alarm, mistook a car alarm for my own pulse. I still don’t understand why the rhythm of life is want or fear. Once: the the redbuds took their time, the swell of each bud kept secret for weeks, then one morning, the rain arrived sideways, and there was pink everywhere. Once: forsythia, sudden and obscene, yellow-throated and shrieking from every hillside, the color of hope. Each iteration, proof nostalgia is just losing track of how you are changed by what you thought you knew. The cherry blossoms are different this year. The tree does not remember last year's flowers, so it makes new mouths to speak with.
Music station setup. Victrola record player next to a stack of LPs and CDs. Standing cover is Frightened Rabbit, Painting of a Panic Attack.
Translation I was learning a new language, but it exploded, and now my mouth doesn't know what to do with all these phonemes without the rules. They are screaming, but all I can do is cry.
I use the word curiosity in the French sense of a tireless awareness of things. (It is too late to arrest the deterioration of our greatest English words. We live in an age where pity and charity have taken on the colour of condescen-sion; where humility seems to mean an acknowledgment of failure; where simplicity is foolishness and curiosity is interference. To-day hope, and faith itself, implies a deliberate self-deception.)
A vase full of happy flowers in pinks and blues, and a green succulent in a black pot.
An Orison, With Candles The universe spent thirteen billion years making something that would know it was afraid. All that arithmetic, this body's long misdirection, the years, just stones, just noise. The galaxy expanded its chest just to hold the particular music of my specific name. The heart has been opening and closing its red fist, my whole life. Do you know how faithful that is? Marrow sings its single song: alive, alive, alive, alive, the blood's dumb grammar, steadfast as gravity. Here is what I know about living: the beetle knows it. The slow grass knows. Something in the blood has always known before the mind caught up, graceless, late. Death is the worst neighbor, a god of bad timing, and still the plum tree splits its throat open every spring without being asked. Right now, though: the people who love me badly and well. The smoke goes up anyway, candles wished-upon or not, some kind of burning, some kind of release. I dislike cake, except for one day, where the almond is a pit, a bone, a seed, the poppyseeds are small black eyes. Every birthday is made of what was once alive. We eat it like grateful animals we are, in the good grief of another year.
Phone photograph of trees and greenery against a grey sky. The winter-bare branches are dripping with bright green moss and lichen. Darker pine trees in the background provide contrast.
Photograph of RosalĂ­a wearing a flowing, extravagant red gown on a sunny beach. Her hair is blowing in the wind as she faces the sun.
HOW TO NOT BE A PERFECTIONIST People are vivid and small and don't live very long-
Schubertiana I. Outside New York, a high place where with one glance you take in the houses where eight million human beings live. The giant city over there is a long flimmery drift, a spiral galaxy seen from the side. Inside the galaxy, coffee cups are being pushed across the desk, department-store windows beg, a whirl of shoes that leave no trace behind. Fire escapes climbing up, elevator doors that silently close, behind triple-locked doors a steady swell of voices. Slumped-over bodies doze in subway cars, catacombs in motion. I know also-statistics to the side-that at this moment in some room down there Schubert is being played, and for that person the notes are more real than all the rest. II. The immense treeless plains of the human brain have gotten folded and refolded till they are the size of a fist. The swallow in April returns to its last year's nest under the eaves in precisely the right barn in precisely the right township. She flies from the Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over two continents, navigates toward precisely this one disappearing dot in the landmass. And the man who gathers up the signals from a whole lifetime into a few rather ordinary chords for five string musicians the one who got a river to flow through the eye of a needle is a plump young man from Vienna, his friends called him "The Mushroom," who slept with his glasses on and every morning punctually stood at his high writing table. When he did that the wonderful centipedes started to move on the page.
ONE LOSS FOLDS ITSELF INSIDE ANOTHER One loss folds itself inside another. It is like the origami held inside a plain sheet of paper. Not creased yet. Not yet more heavy. The hand stays steady.
SWIMMING LESSONS A sperm whale dives deeper than the sun reaches, singing to something it trusts is there. A salmon knows its home by taste, by some molecular memory and breathing a whole river. Tardigrades thrive from the Antarctic to deep sea vents, which makes me think we could try harder. The heart of a blue whale weighs 400 pounds, the narrator says - big enough for two people.
Landscape with a grassy cliff as the ocean stretches toward mountains in the distance.
Book cover. General Ehrlich. Author of The Solace Of Open Spaces. Islands, the Universe, Home. In the center is a painting of a gray and white mountain against a blue and white sky. Dark trees in the foreground.
In the Grand Scheme of Things It sounds like someone wound up the wrens and let them go, let them chatter across your lawn like cheap toys, and from here an airplane seems to fly only from one tree to another, barely chalking a line between them. We say the naked eye as if the eye could be clothed, as if it isn't the world that refuses to undress unless we turn our backs. It shows us what it chooses, nothing more, and it's not waxing pastoral. There is too much now at stake. The skeletal rattle you hear at the window could be only the hellion roses in the wind, their thorns etching the glass, but it could be bones. The country we call ours isn't, and it's full of them. Every year you dig that goddamn rose bush from the bed, spoon it from soil like a tumor, and every year it grows back thick and wild. We say in the grand scheme of things as if there were one. We say that's not how the world works as if the world works.
Still from Twin Peaks. Inside the a diner. Cooper looks distant but serene and is drinking coffee and speaking to Audrey, who looks naive, “Well, Audrey, to be perfectly honest, I’m tired and a little on edge.”
FIRE, IN WINTER The fox is a throat with a body attached and she meets it with stillness, with the kind of calm that makes emergency possible. It screams. Listen: a heart that big will howl, will make you think the world is ending when really it's just lonely. The sound cracks the air in half. She stays steady as snow accumulating. The fox finishes. Trots away. Leaves the breath of its howl hanging there.
The Whole Works The wind's hand caresses the forehead of space again & again. The stars half-close their blue eyelids again & again.
HELIOTROPIC First light is the loneliest hour. The world remembering there are edges to things, boundaries coming back into focus. I wake already mourning the dream where you gave me flowers, where you could. I turn toward the window, a helpless pivot.
Selby, a white woman with blue eyes, with unkempt dark blonde hair, unshaven, looking sad and uncertain.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SAFETY You've been walking around with your heart on the outside all year, and nothing has killed you yet. A cardinal mistakes the window for sky. Falls. You hold your breath. A crash is just the sound things make before starting over - small red body, stunned, then flying again.
Cover art for Fiona Apple’s album Tidal. Facial closeup of a white woman. Lip at the bottom. Nose center. Ice blue eyes with thick mascara in her eyelashes. Dark eyebrows.
SONGS You test the firmness of your voice in the shower where running water can drown you out, where, wet, you can pretend you're not really a house fire waiting for a match. Through the wall, your neighbor practices violin, the same four bars of something almost beautiful. You lie there counting the mistakes, each one bringing her closer to the end. Outside, someone's car alarm performs an aria of panic and you think: yes, exactly, sing it.
THE ASPEN PATH The aspen leaves have fledged and so are distant, having traveled into their exterior summer lives, preoccupied now with living, not dreaming. A loss of intimate relation. Though breezes move toward me with softer hands. Why can't I approach my own growth with such undivided intentions? Without new teachers, I revisit the rituals, a star I make room for in a small asymmetrical window, pussy willow soaking its roots in an earthenware cup. The phases come. The trunks are timeless. As if the moon were shining on them through the day. All light enters us without permission. The logic is unanswerable: aging is the body's crime. I stand under trees as if under their influence. Water everywhere to read this season. See, it has swallowed the highest stone. The rainbow-lipped branches in the gradual thaumaturgy of spring rain— we each have an instrument. It wakes the younger ones first,
Graphic text that reads BARBED RHUBARB. The word BARBED is spiky. The word RHUBARB is made of rhubarb pieces. Both a pink and green on a light pink background.
A birdfeeder-cam photo of a Steller’s Jay, a crested black and blue bird. It looks like it is high and grinning.
PROPAGATION You cut yourself in half to start over. You tremble less when you dig. Dirt takes what your hands give it. You plant cosmos, watch them bend pink in the wind. A friend asks what you're learning. You say: how to be held by something that doesn't demand you stay the same.
ASMR You've started lying about having plans. You fall asleep to videos: someone else's hands kneading dough, braiding hair, wrapping gifts for people they love. The rain outside sounds like applause or like someone running toward you, and you can't tell which would be worse, being celebrated or being reached. You drift. Rain falls. Dough rises. In time-lapse it looks excited and you wonder what it would take to become that soft, that willing to be shaped by warmth?
SELF HELP You wake up with a hole in your torso so big you can fit your whole arm when you try reaching through. No pain, no blood. You can see stars inside. They are so warm. And you can pull them closer.
BEAUTIFUL LITTLE DREAM You're folding my laundry but you're doing it wrong, making swans instead of squares, the laciest origami, ever, and I'm furious or in love. You're doing your best. Your best is birds. You don't even know how beautiful they are. Silken moments, part of a future. "I wish we had wings," you whisper, and then I wake up, wanting you so badly. My chest a suitcase, lock broken, swans spilling everywhere.
Album art. A reflected image of a white woman with curly hair with heavy eye makeup. Pink text reads “Goldfrapp” with “Felt Mountain” in yellow below.
WE STILL CALL IT AUTUMN Picking apples, beneath a fluorescent sky. Like it matters, like the future is something you can hold in your hand, turn over, and check for bruises.
Garden dahlia. Bright red flower with a golden center against green leaves.
WINTER DRIVE The highway is a seam and we are its unraveling. The ocean, when we reach it, is the same color as doubt, gray and endless. Full of whitecaps and cold teeth. We stand in the edge of a cliff, feel the mist, taste salt. We stay anyway. You take my hand, which doesn't solve anything but here we are anyway, solved or unsolved, standing where a continent gives up, where the land says, "I can't, I'm tired of holding things together," but you're still holding my hand.
Album art for Laika, Sounds of the Satellites, a black and white space dog in a helmet sits on a moon next to a red rocket.
Rehearsal for Surviving Extinction The moon keeps forgetting its lines. I coach it from below: Try the part where you disappear. Everything is practice for ending. The way a plum rots into its own sweetness. What is a breakdown? The moon goes dark without asking permission. The plum doesn't apologize. I reach out in the dark, finding mostly air, mostly future, mostly the shape of myself becoming otherwise. Softly, the moon sings.
Covert art for Imperial Bedroom by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Brightly colored geometric designs with a mostly yellow figure with dark hair.