Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged I know I know the kingdom is not fair but it’s what I have a montage of red and a mitosis of knuckles I’m not sure how you could expect me to love anything Ain’t no question sadness is regal like that golden and replaceable once I wanted a lineage of identical men once a mouth soft and hot as the quickest way that gold can hurt you You see a pattern yet? I practice the want of nothing and fail I’ve been shown how ugly I can be when I am invisible I don’t believe in yesterdays The throat of loneliness? Straddled with my knife I press my hands to my face and the lament is a valley the light sags through What do you do when you have lost Everything? Rewrite the history of Everything I don’t like my smile because someone told me I didn’t like it Now I am gorgeous in all the languages I mothered Flex the antonym of Missing I avenge myself Stretch my hands I orphan my grief for the living and it is beauty ain’t no question I monarch the lonely I my own everything now I miss my love and it is an American grief I strike the smell from nostalgia cut my memory to spite my country What is the odor of nothing but my dominion in want of excess I grin and pillars of bone flower into sawed-off crowns say I flex the light and the light flexes heat shimmer unfurling like a bicep my lust a mirage where the body is merely a congealing of the river I can feel it slowly drifting away from me The world I knew is gone and getting more gone and my anthem populating my nose with an abundance of salt I slip the shroud over the life I named and forget I belonged to someone once My soverign's face is a riot of diamonds whining This will be a beautiful death and I am free and gorgeous and desperate to never have to miss anyone again I rock the jeweled shroud become the bride of my own sad light
Copyright © 2018 by Julian Randall. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 3, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
You are not beautiful, exactly. You are beautiful, inexactly. You let a weed grow by the mulberry and a mulberry grow by the house. So close, in the personal quiet of a windy night, it brushes the wall and sweeps away the day till we sleep. A child said it, and it seemed true: “Things that are lost are all equal.” But it isn’t true. If I lost you, the air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow. Someone would pull the weed, my flower. The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you, I’d have to ask the grass to let me sleep.
"To Dorothy," from Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000, published by Copper Canyon Press. Copyright © 2000 by Marvin Bell. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press and the author. All rights reserved.
She stands
In the quiet darkness,
This troubled woman,
Bowed by
Weariness and pain,
Like an
Autumn flower
In the frozen rain.
Like a
Wind-blown autumn flower
That never lifts its head
Again.
From The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) by Langston Hughes. This poem is in the public domain.
Your names toll in my dreams.
I pick up tinsel in the street. A nameless god
streaks my hand with blood. I look at the lighted trees
in windows & the spindles of pine tremble
in warm rooms. The flesh of home, silent.
How quiet the bells of heaven must be, cold
with stars who cannot rhyme their brilliance
to our weapons. What rouses our lives each moment?
Nothing but life dares dying. My memory, another obituary.
My memory is a cross. Face down. A whistle in high grass.
A shadow pouring down the sill of calamity.
Your names wake me in the nearly dark hour.
The candles in our windows flicker
where your faces peer in, ask us
questions light cannot answer.
Copyright © 2013 by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on February 21, 2013.
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane; But last year's bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide. There are a hundred places where I fear To go,—so with his memory they brim. And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, "There is no memory of him here!" And so stand stricken, so remembering him.
This poem is in the public domain.
The night before my father died
I dreamed he was back home,
and I in my old room
on the third floor, and he
was calling up to me
from the bottom of the stairs
some advice I couldn’t hear
or recall the next day when,
standing over him
back in the ICU
full of the chirping of machines
we had decided to unplug,
I remembered the dream
and heard him call my name.
Copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey Harrison. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 22, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
1 If that someone who's me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me, as he is, shouldn't he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said? If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then, shouldn't he have warned me he'd even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront? I'm a child then, yet already I've composed this conscience-beast, who harries me: is there anything else I can say with certainty about who I was, except that I, that he, could already draw from infinitesimal transgressions complex chords of remorse, and orchestrate ever-undiminishing retribution from the hapless rest of myself? 2 The son of some friends of my parents has died, and my parents, paying their call, take me along, and I'm sent out with the dead boy's brother and some others to play. We're joking around, and words come to my mind, which to my amazement are said. How do you know when you can laugh when somebody dies, your brother dies? is what's said, and the others go quiet, the backyard goes quiet, everyone stares, and I want to know now why that someone in me who's me yet not me let me say it. Shouldn't he have told me the contrition cycle would from then be ever upon me, it didn't matter that I'd really only wanted to know how grief ends, and when? 3 I could hear the boy's mother sobbing inside, then stopping, sobbing then stopping. Was the end of her grief already there? Had her someone in her told her it would end? Was her someone in her kinder to her, not tearing at her, as mine did, still does, me, for guessing grief someday ends? Is that why her sobbing stopped sometimes? She didn't laugh, though, or I never heard her. How do you know when you can laugh? Why couldn't someone have been there in me not just to accuse me, but to explain? The kids were playing again, I was playing, I didn't hear anything more from inside. The way now sometimes what's in me is silent, too, and sometimes, though never really, forgets.
From Wait. Copyright © 2010 by C. K. Williams. Used with permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.
I beg for invisible fire.
Every night I pray to love,
please invent yourself.
I imagine a place after this place
and I laugh quietly to no one
as the hair on my chin
weeds through old makeup.
When I go to sleep
I am vinegar inside clouded glass.
The world comes to an end
when I wake up and wonder
who will be next to me.
Police sirens and coyote howls
blend together in morning’s net.
Once, I walked out past the cars
and stood on a natural rock formation
that seemed placed there to be stood on.
I felt something like kinship.
It was the first time.
Once, I believed god
was a blanket of energy
stretched out around
our most vulnerable
places,
when really,
she’s the sound
of a promise
breaking
Copyright © 2020 by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 14, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
Under my body’s din,
a hum that won’t quiet,
I still hear what you’ve hidden
in all the waves of sound:
each bead of pain
that buries its head
like a black-legged tick,
intractable but mine
to nurse or lure with heat.
Please, tell me
what it means that I’ve grown
to love the steady sound
of so many kinds of caving in,
buckling down, the way
a body gives itself away
like a sullen bride or the runt
who couldn’t latch? I know I’m just
a hairline crack the music
leaves behind. I love
the music, though I can’t keep it.
Copyright © 2019 Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison. Used with permission of the authors. This poem originally appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Winter 2019.
You weren’t well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.
I didn’t for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You’d been out—at work maybe?—
having a good day, almost energetic.
We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we’d lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of the narrative
by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?
So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of —warm brown tea—we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.
Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.
From Sweet Machine, published by HarperCollins. Copyright © 1998 by Mark Doty. All rights reserved. Used with permission.