Last year, I was invited by a friend to take part in a “postcard poetry project”. It is apparently an annual thing started by Aaron Anstett, a poet from Colorado. The idea is that we all get a mailing list, then when it started in late December, we sent postcards containing freshly written original poems to the 3 people above us on the list, then every time we received a postcard poem or 3 days had gone by we would send out another card until we worked our way through the list, with it all wrapping up in late March.

The mailing list was 3 pages long, so there were quite a few postcards to write! Rather than use random postcards or some local tourist-y photos, I opted to have custom cards printed with art by my friend, Dan Nielsen. Thanks to Dan for giving me permission to use his art for these!

Since the mailing list was pretty long, I am going to share the postcard poems I wrote over this and the next few posts as well. (I took photos of each before I sent it, but I have emailed them to myself in chunks, so the following poems won’t follow strict chronological order.)

For Steve Timm

Rabbinical pity party
halfway to Minocqua
real smoke palazzo
filled brash to halfway
plump blanket layered
a well done fubsy

12/24/25

–

Morning, for Jennifer Firestone

moon caught up
the poking boats row
coping banal Peking
a manual arrow
laughter sized rabbinical
protest shining
over precious man-made
shindig memories

12/21/25

–

Wheelhouse, for Megan Breiseth

Ashen sheets, the impetus
of horses
Shorn and awful hedgerows
It isn’t even the when
halfway between it
Warsongs what have it
all wrong

12/21/25

–

Terrain Type for Polio, for J. Diego Frey

Let’s talk of apostrophes
Less strands the caustic
overland backpack
Selection guaranteed
A trivial orator pescatarian
Apostle episode less
likely forever
Please exit accordingly

12/30/25

–

Rejection Practice, for Tony Trigilio

Outsource beauty
Not for nothing
Shining the way anything shines
Falls short of wish bathing
Bashful trial thong
A bean leap contrarian

1/4/26

–

Cookies, for Chadwick Ferguson

Every soot stained football
even in full traffic
Fortunes a phrase behind
fleeting meaning
Suggesting a donkey is
pronounced, not expected
And every open hand
pauses to unravel it

12/21/25

–

For Dawn Pendergast

Extra artless endeavors haul back
Great congress of passionate bleating
The rose water jewel connection
Isn’t enough to fuel their suffering

1/10/26

–

For Greg Kosmicki

The mirage of ice fails
its white hot journey
suspended in the echoes
that burn the trapped
and rotten mind

2/4/26

–

For Jean Nakada

Perhaps listening to stars
in peripheral drift
is key to the melodies,
the spiral songs,
as viewed from the floor
at the heart of new complexity

2/3/26

–

Sri Lanka – Or Hibernation, for Spencer Goertz-Giffen

Torpid aptitude
A capacity for crossroads
Pituitary system –
anterior orchestral
An independent country
Overland community –
We met a bored teenager
The orthodox school

1/4/26

–

Simple Pyre, for Jen Tynes

Crow eats ashes.
Pure candlelight, filthy
in its fetishes.
Sunken subject
Stealing time,
Southern plastic personnel
Melting as they reach
for Heaven

1/5/26

–

For Kathleen Kirk

Adverse seven vein
for fever
Obtuse black and
counter party
Awaken
Wavelength
Divert
Cohesion
Very fine tabula
Ripe for garden tools

1/11/26

–

For Mark Svenvold

Non-Linear memory machine
Why speak the bright line
Lips wisp bespoke machismo
Leaning into a million
billion lies

1/11/26

–

For Lara Durback

Matrimony version for
very fine wrenches
Across enough for silly-putty
A spell born crescendo
Surrounded the sepia
snow-cone disaster

1/13/26

–

For Rebecca Van DeVoort

Floating charcuterie blossom
Blackened support system
Sculpted for the manual
An alleyside fiasco

1/13/26

–

For Heidi Hermanson

Something heavy,
squeezing chance
Quiet movements, insecure
Early evening, white walls
This smooth and second Sunday

1/23/26

–

For Aaron Anstett

Nine foot grassland
Early invisible
Sapphire slander, naming stones
A tide, a child
An eager vessel
Making small eruptions

1/23/26

–

For Paul Ebenkamp

Facetious cylinder, dry arrival
Effort called rival liar
Shunter scycle, trial by fire
Efficient supply

Say anything

1/23/26

–

For Carol Guerrero-Murphy

Frayed and kinetic form
More for after the red strand
Mask mouthed hunger
Formless scene
Perhaps the thrill is broken

1/23/26

–

For James Yeary

Cellular song for moons
explosion wilding within
lightning mandala cries
of the bewildering way
ignition screams GO!

2/1/26

–

For Candace Hill-Montgomery

To inhibit pirhouettes
of smoke and light
and strewn wild
to astral avenues
each beam a forest
of its own must be
the purview of every infinity

2/4/26

–

For Therese Samson

The gnashing flarelight
as we transition
screams in re-combination
by the magic that lingers
in every frequency

2/4/26

–

note: this person perhaps misunderstood the “rules” and sent me an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” rather than an original poem. “The Hollow Men” was one of the first poems I loved when I was young, but not necessarily what this project was about. So, when I wrote my postcard back, I based my original poem on the excerpt I was sent.

For Ginny Hoyle

In each Hollow Man
there beats a drum
and song ne’er heard
but for wish to dream
a violent and fading star
and still we wear
the disguise of this existence.

2/4/26

–

For Jeffrey Joe Nelson

Song bent black
the broken head
we saw the savage water
Horses heard through
some part of you
bent toward the distance

2/6/26

–

For Nora Howard

To live for the never
Old forest most hardcore
Makes the last word
Finding meaning in fire
And we’ll never have
chants to cuts the
sleepless mind

2/12/26

–

For Allison Campbell

A photo explained to the coldest city
Destroyer, the cult of
umami dealt nightmare
The interrogator defends
the scribe for gluttony
A joke to them for fools

2/12/26

–

For Betsy Fagin

Several serious jokes
Measuring books in wanting
Seeking out years is the
thing to share
The local colossus colonies
narrate rules like teachers
And all we remember
is the expanding silence

2/17/26

–

More to come in the next couple weeks!

Jay Mollerskov, ArtRoot Writer-in-Residence –4/3/26