Love comes quietly,
finally, drops
about me, on me,
in the old ways.
What did I know
thinking myself
able to go
alone all the way.
From For Love: Poems. Copyright © 1962 by Robert Creeley. Used with permission of the Estate of Robert Creeley and The Permissions Company.
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,
I know; full well I know.
The white man seeks the soft, fat place,
And he moves and he works by rule.
Ingenious grows the humbler race
In Oppression’s prodding school.
And it’s, oh, for a white man gone to seed,
While the Negro struggles so!
And I know which race develops most,
I know; yes, well I know.
The white man rides in a palace car,
And the Negro rides “Jim Crow”
To damn the other with bolt and bar,
One creepeth so low; so low!
And it’s, oh, for a master’s nose in the mire,
While the humbled hearts o’erflow!
Well I know whose soul grows big at this,
And whose grows small; I know!
The white man leases out his land,
And the Negro tills the same.
One works; one loafs and takes command;
But I know who wins the game!
And it’s, oh, for the white man’s shrinking soil.
As the black’s rich acres grow!
Well I know how the signs point out at last,
I know; ah, well I know!
The white man votes for his color’s sake.
While the black, for his is barred;
(Though “ignorance” is the charge they make),
But the black man studies hard.
And it’s, oh, for the white man’s sad neglect,
For the power of his light let go!
So, I know which man must win at last,
I know! Ah, Friend, I know!
From The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), edited by James Weldon Johnson. This poem is in the public domain.
In the invitation, I tell them for the seventeenth time
(the fourth in writing), that I am gay.
In the invitation, I include a picture of my boyfriend
& write, You’ve met him two times. But this time,
you will ask him things other than can you pass the
whatever. You will ask him
about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be
enjoyable. Please RSVP.
They RSVP. They come.
They sit at the table & ask my boyfriend
the first of the conversation starters I slip them
upon arrival: How is work going?
I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating
every movement of a proper family, as if a pair
of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars
is watching from the outside.
My boyfriend responds in his chipper way.
I pass my father a bowl of fish ball soup—So comforting,
isn’t it? My mother smiles her best
Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend
Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing
a Little Better Smile.
Everyone eats soup.
Then, my mother turns
to me, whispers in Mandarin, Is he coming with you
for Thanksgiving? My good friend is & she wouldn’t like
this. I’m like the kid in Home Alone, pulling
on the string that makes my cardboard mother
more motherly, except she is
not cardboard, she is
already, exceedingly my mother. Waiting
for my answer.
While my father opens up
a Boston Globe, when the invitation
clearly stated: No security
blankets. I’m like the kid
in Home Alone, except the home
is my apartment, & I’m much older, & not alone,
& not the one who needs
to learn, has to—Remind me
what’s in that recipe again, my boyfriend says
to my mother, as though they have always, easily
talked. As though no one has told him
many times, what a nonlinear slapstick meets
slasher flick meets psychological
pit he is now co-starring in.
Remind me, he says
to our family.
Copyright © 2018 by Chen Chen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 19, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
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?
We’ve been together seven years
& only now do I begin
clearing my throat to speak to you.
“A Poem for My Wife” from DAVID'S COPY: THE SELECTED POEMS OF DAVID MELTZER by David Meltzer, Introduction by Jerome Rothenberg, Edited with a Foreword by Michael Rothenberg, copyright © 2005 by David Meltzer. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
All I remember is the coppiced terrain I crossed to find a house to rest in. Who is the woman lurking in the woods? A fellow traveler. I’m not used to seeing others. She is lost and I am lost but the difference is she is a novice at being lost, whereas I have always been without country. Without planet. When we happen upon a cabin I ask the house for shelter on her behalf. I’m aware that we come off as oogles but want to prove we are different by washing dishes. To concretize my gratitude.
In the morning, before the others awake, I set off for the holy site in a horse-drawn carriage. The carriage has a detachable sleeping chamber designed so that a princely man can carry me supine whenever the horse gets tired.
At sunset my pilgrimage is complete. The Asian market is a glass palace overlooking an airport. From outside the Palace of Snacks the products shine like organs inside a hard, translucent skin. As I take the palace escalator heavenward my eyes are fixed on an airplane parked on the runway.
It is waiting for me.
From The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void (Nightboat Books, 2021) by Jackie Wang. Copyright © 2021 Jackie Wang. Used with the permission of Nightboat Books.
In the rain, in her head, an elegy for the not-quite-dead.
Some peonies placed beside her body, supine beneath the canopy of forgotten dreams.
She woke in such a state, such a state that she had to take shelter from the beloved's rain beneath a tree.
It rained so hard she didn't know where she was.
I don’t like being left to myself like this.
From The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void (Nightboat Books, 2021) by Jackie Wang. Copyright © 2021 Jackie Wang. Used with the permission of Nightboat Books.
“More than gems in my comb box shaped by the
God of the Sea, I prize you, my daughter . . .”
—Lady Otomo, eighth century, Japan
A woman weaves her daughter’s wedding slippers that will carry her steps into a new life. The mother weeps alone into her jeweled sewing box slips red thread around its spool, the same she used to stitch her daughter’s first silk jacket embroidered with turtles that would bring luck, long life. She remembers all the steps taken by her daughter’s unbound quick feet: dancing on the stones of the yard among yellow butterflies and white breasted sparrows. And she grew, legs strong body long, mind independent. Now she captures all eyes with her hair combed smooth and her hips gently swaying like bamboo. The woman spins her thread from the spool of her heart, knotted to her daughter‘s departing wedding slippers.
Reprinted from Love Works by permission of City Lights Foundation. Copyright © 2002 by Janice Mirikitani. All rights reserved.
Things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly
Things got ugly embarrassingly quickly
actually Things got ugly unbelievably quickly
honestly Things got ugly seemingly infrequently
initially Things got ugly ironically usually
awfully carefully Things got ugly unsuccessfully
occasionally Things got ugly mostly painstakingly
quietly seemingly Things got ugly beautifully
infrequently Things got ugly sadly especially
frequently unfortunately Things got ugly
increasingly obviously Things got ugly suddenly
embarrassingly forcefully Things got really ugly
regularly truly quickly Things got really incredibly
ugly Things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully
Copyright © 2019 by Terrance Hayes. Used with the permission of the poet.
Seven of the ten things I love in the face
Of James Baldwin concern the spiritual
Elasticity of his expressions. The sashay
Between left & right eyebrow, for example.
The crease between his eyes like a tuning
Fork or furrow, like a riverbed branching
Into tributaries like lines of rapturous sentences
Searching for a period. The dimple in his chin
Narrows & expands like a pupil. Most of all,
I love all of his eyes. And those wrinkles
The feel & color of wet driftwood in the mud
Around those eyes. Mud is made of
Simple rain & earth, the same baptismal
Spills & hills of dirt James Baldwin is made of.
From American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Terrance Hayes. Used with the permission of the poet.
And I understand well now, it is beautiful
to be dumb: my tyrannical inclinations, my love
for the prodigal jocks aging from primetime
to pastime, the pixilated plain people and colored folk
with homemade signs. Cutouts, cutups, ambushes,
bushwackers. The clouds are overwhelmed
and vainglorious. MC Mnemosyne showed up
around midnight like the undetectable dew
weighing the leaves, and I was like Awww shit.
Why ain't I dead yet
like the man who wanted to be buried
with the multi-million dollar Van Gogh he bought?
(Members of The Arts League said No
because there was culture to be made into money.)
The volant statues of the aviary, the jabber-jawed
cable channels and the book in which nothing is written
but the words everyone uses to identify things
that can’t be identified. Not that I ain’t spent
the last ten years of my life refining my inner cyborg.
Interview questions included how did the DJ break his hands,
who’s gone bury the morticians who bury the dead,
And what to do about the sublime and awful music
of grade school marching bands?
Not that Neanderthals have a sense of the existential.
Me and my forty-leventh cousins lolling, and LOL-ing
like chthonic chronic smoke, like high-water suit pants
and extreme quiet. Everybody clap ya hands.
Like fit girls in fitted outfits, misfits who don’t cry enough,
who definitely don’t sob, but keep showing up sighing.
Everyone loves to identify things that have not been identified.
The rabbit hole, where ever I find it, symbolizes solitude.
So that’s exciting. And an argument can be made
on behalf of athletes, rap stars, and various other brothers
who refuse (click here for the entire video)
to wear shirts in public when one considers the beauty
of a black torso. If and when the dashiki is fashionable
again I will sport it with the aplomb of a peacock plume.
For now, I have a row of coin-sized buttons tattooed
down my chest so it looks like I mean business
when I'm naked. I know that means a lot to you.
Copyright © 2013 by Terrance Hayes. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on September 27, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.