I watched in horror as the man hung half a pig by a hook in the window. Nearby, the sea shone or something. Nearby, the wingspan of a hawk cast an elongated shadow. I listened with horror to the words I was missing. A wrongness was growing in the living moon. & nearby, the sea rolled endlessly. Nearby, the saw grass peered through the grit & preened. I've never been to Florida. Louisiana however is second skin of mind, a habit-habitat. & Texas on the way there, the red soil & black boars, the frankly haunted pines lone men in pickups fishing for nothing they intend to catch. & nearby, the sea froths over the edge. & nearby, the sea. Nearer & nearer the obliterating sea
Copyright © 2017 by Shanna Compton. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 8, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs
and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead
on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow
feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.
I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot
feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls
skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.
To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white
petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am
in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.
Copyright © 2017 by Donika Kelly. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 20, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Surely the body is made of stranger things than politics can steal: the tangled residue of stars, the plastic bag and orange peels I kick past the bridge, flaming nerves splayed across ancient and forgotten avenues, the stomach-heavy goodbye to others that always feels a limit on anyone’s remaining days I see now I really did believe that the stories of languages breaking open the embedded money source were the victory of changing grandeur over the paltry measured ties misnamed time— I could never believe that people meant the counting, the stacking, the definitions the dividing, that those could be more than misunderstanding even when burned in iron; The world is simply not anything any of us say of it our names are strange delusions pulling us back from a brink we are always falling through— it has no shape no words it is not a brink we are not anyone there is no falling
Copyright © 2017 Mark Wallace. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 28, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
The fern gathers where the water seldom goes
unless the storms swell this world of wise choices,
the loud trickle of clear tongues of the stream
licking the edges of rock, while up ahead a curve
hides tomorrow from our crystal ball, the thing
we are afraid to admit we have, the guarantee
we hide from faith. In the woods our dog is lost
from time to time, until suddenly we hear her paws
inside winter’s death becoming the yearly promise
of new undergrowth, her careless paws that beg
each day for the next bowl of treats, true faith
in what love yields. The rain stops not long after
it threatens to soak us with cold and chills, the trees
open to the gradual break of blue inside the gray,
turning the clouds naked and white under the sun,
the stream disappears under a bridge made by men
so trucks can crawl back and forth over this road
of dirt with its one row of grass, where our tongues
make a silver thread finding its way past the fear.
Copyright © 2017 Afaa Michael Weaver. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 27, 2017.
What does it mean to be so still? to glide along the ocean floor like some black-tongued electric eel, to burn through marbled gold and green of oceanic things like some compact mass deforming space, time, a void within voids, and then? It is easier to imagine amphibian, to know that blood, too, can change its temperament as quickly as salamanders change skin, as quickly as eyes of newt and tongues of dog become incantations, enchantments of art and life just as an animal submerged under water becomes unknown, just as respirations become primitive and breaths and motions cease as a lone fish in a dark pond arrives as an object of thought and becomes stone.
Copyright © 2017 by Rita Banerjee. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 30, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.