there are maple trees, one, two, three
but wait there’s 5 more, 2 behind the bungalow
and lots in the poetry state forest
I hear target practice from far away, it’s
probably for shooting deer, bears and dinosaurs
but how will we, still alive, socialize
in the winter? wrapped in bear skins
we’ll sit around pot-bellied stoves eating
the lobelias of fear leftover from desperation
last summer’s woodland sunflowers and bee balm
remind us of black cherry eaten in a hurry
while the yard grows in the moonlight
shrinking like a salary or a damaged item
when we return in the morning for a breakfast
of harvest petunias sprinkled with wild marsh mallow

Copyright © 2021 by Bernadette Mayer. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 21, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in. I have learned to repeat these words to myself whenever I feel stuck.

Fear rustles mantras out of my body. I have risked a motherland. Why not also seduce the foreigner who implores nativity if loneliness can be broken and shared?

                                                         Aquarius

When Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical debuts on Broadway in April of 1968, it becomes the first production to include a nude scene with its entire cast.

Around the same time, Star Trek has popularized the phrase, Where no man has gone before.

Our bodies contain elements of outer space. So that when we’re naked we are gazing at the universe.

                                                         Aquarius

The night of my second panic attack, after getting released from the hospital and determined to change my mental health’s course, I dream of a nebula in the shape of an octopus, holding an astronaut in each tentacle. From my perspective, the cosmonauts feed on all my arms.

                                                         Aquarius

No more falsehoods or derisions. Golden living dreams of visions. Mystic crystal revelation and the mind's true liberation.

                                                         Aquarius

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, plurality overtakes singularity. History becomes bored by its self-referentialism. Triangles burrow into single lines. Equal signs collapse on the spikes of other equal signs.

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, we give birth to information and information delivers us. I make a fist and my fist speaks in four languages. Letters enter me and suddenly I experience flavors few before me have.

In the Age of Aquarius, give or take, gender is a tree is a building is a cloud. It is anything that hasn’t been said. The truest instinct one listens to more and more.

Copyright © 2020 by Roy G. Guzmán. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 6, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.