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Poem-a-day

Abracadabra

^{for Erich and Patricia}

List of things to banish
Can include words, people, theoretical apparatuses
Can take the form of a grocery list, a scientific experiment, or a manifesto
Can read like a personal ad of unwanting
Can summon aid to help with banishing
Can be uncertain of what will remain
Can have no positive mission statement
Can be written in a language other than language
Can circulate amongst FRIENDS ONLY
Can evade being imagined, written, embodied, archived
Can go like this
Can make itself irrelevant
Can include buildings, brushstrokes, and other abominations
Can mean my way of life is unlivable
Can mean my life is as yet unlived
Can mean I must become a menace to my enemies
Can undo futurity forever in favor of *******
Can remake futurity into someone who doesn’t recognize herself
Can punctuate the present like a cup of coffee or a Monday
Can be dreamed up and shot down and elongated
Can tell us something
Can include forms and fantasies, even the ones getting us by
Can instigate an interregnum
Can be unfinished
Can include hope hopefully
Can be blank
But don’t kid yourself
It isn’t
And it can’t include
History

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Mia Kang

Poems

15450 poems

In The Matter Of Two Men

One does such work as one will not,
And well each knows the right;
Though the white storm howls, or the sun is hot,
The black must serve the white.
And it’s, oh, for the white man’s softening flesh,
While the black man’s muscles grow!
Well I know which grows the mightier,

James D. Corrothers

1922

Compensation

O, rich young lord, thou ridest by
With looks of high disdain;
It chafes me not thy title high,
Thy blood of oldest strain.
The lady riding at thy side
Is but in name thy promised bride.
Ride on, young lord, ride on!

James Edwin Campbell

1922

A Poem for My Wife

I’m in my room writing
speaking in myself
& I hear you
move down the hallway
to water your plants

I write truth on the page
I strike the word over & over
yet I worry you’ll pour too much water on the plants
& the water will overflow onto the books
ruining them

If I can’t speak out of myself
how can I tell you I don’t care about the plants?
how can I tell you I don’t care if the books get wet?

David Meltzer

2005

I Have Folded My Sorrows

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gray unicorn.
No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday’s disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday’s pains.

Bob Kaufman

1965

Poets

4121 poets

Danez Smith

Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014).

Jackie Wang

Jackie Wang is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (Nightboat, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award.