“What is dying is the willingness to be in denial.”
—angel Kyodo williams
The heron flew away
and I wanted to tell someone
how long it stayed,
how close I got,
how much I missed it
even as it stood
to watch me,
large-eyed animal
that I am, terrible
at believing what I can’t see.
You see fire in the home
where we live: the world
in cardiac arrest.
A heart attack
is not the onset I want to say
to someone, it’s the flare.
It illuminates what’s already here:
the forests
illuminated, the earth
lit as an origin story.
Here you are,
I say instead,
aloud, surprised
at how close
I’ve been holding you
in the dark.
Flame yields
no new landscape.
It bares the contours
like a map
so we can see
where we’ve been all along,
can see one another
as we walk, and say,
for once, nothing
at the fire’s steady flight,
like a heron
lifting in loud beats,
our silent mouths open
as if to give it a tunnel.
Copyright © 2021 by Leah Naomi Green. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 1, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
This poem originally appeared in Waxwing, Issue 10, in June 2016. Used with permission of the author.
for Kait Rhoads
Gather up whatever is
glittering in the gutter,
whatever has tumbled
in the waves or fallen
in flames out of the sky,
for it’s not only our
hearts that are broken,
but the heart
of the world as well.
Stitch it back together.
Make a place where
the day speaks to the night
and the earth speaks to the sky.
Whether we created God
or God created us
it all comes down to this:
In our imperfect world
we are meant to repair
and stitch together
what beauty there is, stitch it
with compassion and wire.
See how everything
we have made gathers
the light inside itself
and overflows? A blessing.
From Only Now (Deerbrook Editions, 2013). Copyright © 2013 by Stuart Kestenbaum. Used with permission of the author.
the poem begins not where the knife enters
but where the blade twists.
Some wounds cannot be hushed
no matter the way one writes of blood
& what reflection arrives in its pooling.
The poem begins with pain as a mirror
inside of which I adjust a tie the way my father taught me
before my first funeral & so the poem begins
with old grief again at my neck. On the radio,
a singer born in a place where children watch the sky
for bombs is trying to sell me on love
as something akin to war.
I have no lie to offer as treacherous as this one.
I was most like the bullet when I viewed the body as a door.
I’m past that now. No one will bury their kin
when desire becomes a fugitive
between us. There will be no folded flag
at the doorstep. A person only gets to be called a widow once,
and then they are simply lonely. The bluest period.
Gratitude, not for love itself, but for the way it can end
without a house on fire.
This is how I plan to leave next.
Unceremonious as birth in a country overrun
by the ungrateful living. The poem begins with a chain
of well-meaning liars walking one by one
off the earth’s edge. That’s who died
and made me king. Who died and made you.
Copyright © 2019 by Hanif Abdurraqib. From A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House Books, 2019). Used with permission of the author and Tin House Books.
The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don’t mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don’t sing all the time The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn’t half so bad if it isn’t you Oh the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t much mind a few dead minds in the higher places or a bomb or two now and then in your upturned faces or such other improprieties as our Name Brand society is prey to with its men of distinction and its men of extinction and its priests and other patrolmen and its various segregations and congressional investigations and other constipations that our fool flesh is heir to Yes the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and making the love scene and making the sad scene and singing low songs of having inspirations and walking around looking at everything and smelling flowers and goosing statues and even thinking and kissing people and making babies and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing and going swimming in rivers on picnics in the middle of the summer and just generally ‘living it up’ Yes but then right in the middle of it comes the smiling mortician
From A Coney Island of the Mind, copyright ©1955 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
i have diver’s lungs from holding my
breath for so long. i promise you
i am not trying to break a record
sometimes i just forget to
exhale. my shoulders held tightly
near my neck, i am a ball of tense
living, a tumbleweed with steel-toed
boots. i can’t remember the last time
i felt light as dandelion. i can’t remember
the last time i took the sweetness in
& my diaphragm expanded into song.
they tell me breathing is everything,
meaning if i breathe right i can live to be
ancient. i’ll grow a soft furry tail or be
telekinetic something powerful enough
to heal the world. i swear i thought
the last time i’d think of death with breath
was that balmy day in july when the cops
became a raging fire & sucked the breath
out of Garner; but yesterday i walked
38 blocks to my father’s house with a mask
over my nose & mouth, the sweat dripping
off my chin only to get caught in fabric & pool up
like rain. & i inhaled small spurts of me, little
particles of my dna. i took into body my own self
& thought i’d die from so much exposure
to my own bereavement—they’re saying
this virus takes your breath away, not
like a mother’s love or like a good kiss
from your lover’s soft mouth but like the police
it can kill you fast or slow; dealer’s choice.
a pallbearer carrying your body without a casket.
they say it’s so contagious it could be quite
breathtaking. so persistent it might as well
be breathing down your neck—
Copyright © 2020 by Yesenia Montilla. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 21, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
Work out. Ten laps.
Chin ups. Look good.
Steam room. Dress warm.
Call home. Fresh air.
Eat right. Rest well.
Sweetheart. Safe sex.
Sore throat. Long flu.
Hard nodes. Beware.
Test blood. Count cells.
Reds thin. Whites low.
Dress warm. Eat well.
Short breath. Fatigue.
Night sweats. Dry cough.
Loose stools. Weight loss.
Get mad. Fight back.
Call home. Rest well.
Don’t cry. Take charge.
No sex. Eat right.
Call home. Talk slow.
Chin up. No air.
Arms wide. Nodes hard.
Cough dry. Hold on.
Mouth wide. Drink this.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
No air. Breathe in.
Breathe in. No air.
Black out. White rooms.
Head hot. Feet cold.
No work. Eat right.
CAT scan. Chin up.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
No air. No air.
Thin blood. Sore lungs.
Mouth dry. Mind gone.
Six months? Three weeks?
Can’t eat. No air.
Today? Tonight?
It waits. For me.
Sweet heart. Don’t stop.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
"Heartbeats" from Love's Instruments (Tia Chucha Press, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Melvin Dixon. Used with the permission of the Estate of Melvin Dixon.
in loving memory of Concepcion Cruz Agullana
Everywhere is a cemetery,
and there will be no funeral. on either side of the Pacific Ocean.
No one will give last rites to my lola, No guessing nurse will call my name or hers
I will have heard no doctor’s steely voice There’ll be no waiting room
to call her ‘the body.’ Over the body. There will be no priest
swinging a pendulum of incense no prayers no rosaries there’s no money
No undertaker will proclaim her life There’ll be no glass plate covering
her wooden casket. There will be no casket it’s too expensive There will be no party
no lumpia no noodles for no life long enough
No black attire No hands clasping tissue or other hands
‘The body’ will not be seen There will be my grandma in an urn–a tiny basket
her curled body that lilted into the afterlife after dementia twenty years after grandpa
there’s no room for every body
there’s no house for everybody to come in and stay no room for sorrows There will be no placeholder no
land no candles no water no six-foot empty she will be unmarked
my lola, an unnamed earthquake
No one will hear her long name how it stretches a sunset if my lola dies and no one sees is
she still my lola? is a canyon a series of cliffs? there’s no place in the apartment for what rituals
maybe they will send her to the Philippines my grandma is a maybe and we are not they
did you know when airlines carry the deceased
they are called passengers
they travel in their coffins passengers in seats are called existing passengers
this small poem the only eulogy where we’ll put my grandma her existence laid to rest in a
poem
in this non-ilokano language a killer rows and rows of dirt
money doesn’t grow maybe someone there will bury her
how will i carry her when only darkness has the space?
where will we put my grandma when we can’t afford our grief?
Copyright © Janice Sapigao. This poem originally appeared in Drunk in a Midnight Choir. Used with permission of the author.
We felt nostalgic for libraries, even though we were sitting in a library. We looked around the library lined with books and thought of other libraries we had sat in lined with books and then of all the libraries we would never sit in lined with books, some of which contained scenes set in libraries. * We felt nostalgic for post offices, even though we were standing in a post office. We studied the rows of stamps under glass and thought about how their tiny castles, poets, cars, and flowers would soon be sent off to all cardinal points. We rarely got paper letters anymore, so our visits to the post office were formal, pro forma. * We felt nostalgic for city parks, even though we were walking through a city park, in a city full of city parks in a country full of cities full of city parks, with their green benches, bedraggled bushes, and shabby pansies, cut into the city. (Were the city parks bits of nature showing through cutouts in the concrete, or was the concrete showing through cutouts in nature?) * We sat in a café drinking too much coffee and checking our feeds, wondering why we were more anxious about the future than anxiously awaiting it. Was the future showing through cutouts in the present, or were bits of the present showing through cutouts in a future we already found ourselves in, arrived in our café chairs like fizzled jetpacks? The café was in a former apothecary lined with dark wood shelves and glowing white porcelain jars labeled in gilded Latin, which for many years had sat empty. Had a person with an illness coming to fetch her weekly dose of meds from one of the jars once said to the city surrounding the shop, which was no longer this city, Stay, thou art so fair? Weren’t these the words that had sealed the bargainer’s doom? Sitting in our presumptive futures, must we let everything run through our hands—which were engineered to grab—into the past? In the library, in the post office, in the city park, in the café, in the apothecary... o give us the medicine, even if it is a pharmakon—which, as the pharmacist knows, either poisons or heals—just like nostalgia. Just like the ruins of nostalgia.
Copyright © 2020 by Donna Stonecipher. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 8, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
I suppose I should place them under separate files
Both died from different circumstances kind of, one from HIV AIDS and possibly not having
taken his medicines
the other from COVID-19 coupled with
complications from an underlying HIV status
In each case their deaths may have been preventable if one had taken his meds and the
hospital thought to treat the other
instead of sending him home saying, He wasn’t sick enough
he died a few days later
They were both mountains of men
dark black beautiful gay men
both more than six feet tall fierce and way ahead of their time
One’s drag persona was Wonder Woman and the other started a black fashion magazine
He also liked poetry
They both knew each other from the same club scene we all grew up in
When I was working the door at a club one frequented
He would always say to me haven’t they figured out you’re a star yet
And years ago bartending with the other when I complained about certain people and
treatment he said sounds like it’s time for you to clean house
Both I know were proud of me the poet star stayed true to my roots
I guess what stands out to me is that they both were
gay black mountains of men
Cut down
Felled too early
And it makes me think the biggest and blackest are almost always more vulnerable
My white friend speculates why the doctors sent one home
If he had enough antibodies
Did they not know his HIV status
She approaches it rationally
removed from race as if there were any rationale for sending him home
Still she credits the doctors for thinking it through
But I speculate they saw a big black man before them
Maybe they couldn’t imagine him weak
Maybe because of his size color class they imagined him strong
said he’s okay
Which happened to me so many times
Once when I’d been hospitalized at the same time as a white girl
she had pig-tails
we had the same thing but I saw how tenderly they treated her
Or knowing so many times in the medical system I would never have been treated so terribly if I
had had a man with me
Or if I were white and entitled enough to sue
Both deaths could have been prevented both were almost first to fall in this season of death
But it reminds me of what I said after Eric Garner a large black man was strangled to death over
some cigarettes
Six cops took him down
His famous lines were I can’t breathe
so if we are always the threat
To whom or where do we turn for protection?
Copyright © 2020 by Pamela Sneed. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 18, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
I clean its latex length three times a day
With kindliest touch,
Swipe an alcohol swatch
From the tender skin at the tip of him
Down the lumen
To the drainage bag I change
Each day and flush with vinegar.
When I vowed for worse
Unwitting did I wed this
Something-other-than-a-husband, jumble
Of exposed plumbing
And euphemism. Fumble
I through my nurse’s functions, upended
From the spare bed
By his every midnight sound.
Unsought inside our grand romantic
Intimacy
Another intimacy
Opens—ruthless and indecent, consuming
All our hiddenmosts.
In a body, immodest
Such hunger we sometimes call tumor;
In a marriage
It’s cherish. From the Latin for cost.
Copyright © 2020 by Kimberly Johnson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 15, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
Schools are shuttered everything is cancelled and my body has become
an extension of my house this shift is strange but not entirely unfamiliar
the way a cardinal’s home is a disordered stick bomb just about captures
how I feel
how the mother bird uses her shape as a template to form her nest
shoving sticks together in a fit of random engineering randoming would be
the verb I guess or jamming as it applies to me
a steady state of hysteresis
in which applied pressure changes the ensemble in which the structure
bounces back but not completely
I’ve been thinking
of ways to speak to my children about fear how to be adaptive
I want to tell them about zebra finches who are content in captivity
and who unlike robins which favor mud as cement make their nests
from anything they find strips of paper or string fibers from a coconut husk
I want to stress that these elements the finches assemble seem haphazardly
placed but behave collectively how there’s a logic buried deep in the mother
building her nest which is a story of the nature of her body as every child’s
first home that we don’t struggle alone as the architects of our days
that nature will continue to amaze us in ways we don’t expect
Copyright © 2020 by Tina Cane. Originally published in Love’s Executive Order, March 2020. Reprinted with permission of the author.
I was rehearsing the ecstasies of starvation
for what I had to do. And have not charity,
I found my pity, desperately researching
the origins of history, from reed-built communes
by sacred lakes, turning with the first sprocketed
water-driven wheels.
—Derek Walcott
In these silences, the bubbles of hurt are indistinguishable from the terror
that lurks in the body—the phrase, “ecstasies of starvation” will have a music
that lures us to peace, but how do I stay with a tender heart of peace and calm
when I slow in my walk in the face of an old saying that has hidden its conundrum
of theology from me—perhaps not hidden, perhaps what I mean is before
I found my pity, my charity, my love, I could slip over the conundrums,
lead us not into temptation—that imperative that has no sensible answer,
for is this the way of a father, and what kind of father must be asked not to tempt me?
And what of the mercy of temptation, and what of the lessons of temptation,
and what of the diabolical cruelty of testing—you see why I slip over this
with the muteness of the faith that must grow in increments of meaning?
In these silences, the bubbles of anxiety, the hurt I cannot distinguish from terror
is my daily state, and you teach me to pray in this way, and in this way, you teach me
the path of being led into terror. I will say this and let it linger, and what I mean
is that this is the way of poetry for me, for much of what I offer, I am sure of nothing,
the knowing or the outworking, but the trust of its history of resolution—so that I will say,
this is the origin of history, and by this, I mean this small conundrum: “Lead us not,
lead me not, lead them not, lead them not,” And what is this were it not the way
we know the heavy hand of God—that to pray, “Lead them not into temptation”,
is a kind of mercy, and to say, “Lead us not”, is the penitence of a sinning nation
desperate for the lifting of the curses of contagion and plague. The subtext is the finger
pointed at the culprit. So that what kind of father do I tell this to? Might I have said,
“Neville, please, lead me not into temptation”, what would it mean to tell my old man
not to lead me into temptation? Must that not be the same as a reprimand to my father,
a judgment on his propensity to fail me?
Do you want answers? You have come to the wrong
place. I am selfish with answers. I am hoarding all answers. Go, instead, to the prophets
and the preachers, the soothsayers and priests, go to the pundits and the dream readers,
to the pontiffs and kings, to the presidents and mayors, to the brokers in answers. But me,
I hoard the secrets of my calming beauty, and I walk this road, not as a maker of questions—
this would be a crude wickedness—but with the fabric of our uncertainty, a net stretched
across the afternoon sky, this is beauty and in this I will trade until all music ends, and the air
grows crisp as airless grace. They say that if you find honey in the stomach of the baobab tree,
you must leave the better part for the spirit of the tree, and then share the remnant sweetness
with your neighbors. And what they say, among the reeds, what they say, in the arms of the trees,
what they say in the shelter of the sky, that is enough for the days of terror and sorrow. Amen.
Copyright © 2021 by Kwame Dawes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 18, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets