was no consolation to the woman
whose husband was strung out on opioids.
Gone to a better place: useless and suspect intel
for the couple at their daughter’s funeral
though there are better places to be
than a freezing church in February, standing
before a casket with a princess motif.
Some moments can’t be eased
and it’s no good offering clichés like stale
meat to a tiger with a taste for human suffering.
When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up
on a platter of deviled eggs. Everything happens
for a reason: more good tidings someone will try
to trepan your skull to insert. When fire
inhales your house, you don’t care what the haiku says
about seeing the rising moon. You want
an avalanche to bury you. You want to lie down
under a slab of snow, dumb as a jarred
sideshow embryo. What a circus.
The tents dismantled, the train moving on,
always moving, starting slow and gaining speed,
taking you where you never wanted to go.
Copyright © 2024 by Kim Addonizio. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 12, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
If I had known that the cup of chai
my mother asked me, a drifter
in the kitchen, to make her
that afternoon, which I
having blended water and milk
in such strange ratios
that when reduced and strained
the tea came up
to barely one trisection of my pinkie
(that cup was the driest well I saw,
the lowest tide) so to cover my blunder
I poured raw tap water to flood her cup
and fled her room before she could
collect her body, bring lip to saucer,
had I known that the pale, putrid mess
I presented, was after all, the only and
last cup of tea I’d ever make her
would I have suddenly been
granted the culinary wisdom to brew
instead the pot with sprigs of lemongrass,
a pod of cardamom, perhaps even
a prestigious thread of saffron
that I’d sneak from the silver hexagonal box
she kept hidden behind the airtight jars
of pricey nuts, and bring her
a creamy drink of complex caffeine, even
make some magnanimous promise
of offering her tea on tap till she lived
but knowing me, I know I’d have just
continued being the spectacular failure I was
that day, shit-talking my every inability
out of her sight, embarrassed by failure,
afraid of consequence and knowing her,
she would have creased her nose
at first, then continued to descend
on the plate with the hopeful pull
of her slurp, stubborn as she was,
not willing to peg one finite judgement
of adulation or derision—
on the cup she was served
Copyright © 2024 by Preeti Vangani. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 5, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
As he holds his wife’s hand, the nurse tells him to
breathe. He will be a good father. He
could be. His wife tows a boat on land with her teeth.
Don’t worry. Good father. Breathe. Later,
everyone smiles when he jogs with the stroller. He
feigns interest in ponies. He pushes a swing and his daughter
giggles. He applies sunblock, and
helps warm the bottle, and he is
inducted into the fatherly hall of fame. He
jumps on the trampoline, and the chorus sings Good Father. He wipes
ketchup off her cheek at the zoo, and the old women
laud. He is told he is a new breed of
man. Evolved. His knuckles just barely or
never scraping the ground. He hugs
often enough, packs her lunch, and the crowd
pours on the applause. He lays her down for
quiet time. It goes somewhat well.
Rejoice, the people shout, for here is a
saint, as he lifts diapers to the conveyor belt.
Truthfully, he feels slightly
unwell. A bowl of plastic fruit is pretty, but
vaguely toxic. He sleeps fine
without a mouth affixed to his chest. His bottle of
Xanax is half full. The nurse says,
You will be a good father. He jogs with the stroller. He reaches the
zenith of a very small hill.
Copyright © 2024 by Keith Leonard. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 4, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
to Mary Rose
Here is our little yard
too small for a pool
or chickens let alone
a game of tag or touch
football Then
again this stub-
born patch
of crabgrass is just
big enough to get down
flat on our backs
with eyes wide open and face
the whole gray sky just
as a good drizzle
begins I know
we’ve had a monsoon
of grieving to do
which is why
I promise to lie
beside you
for as long as you like
or need
We’ll let our elbows
kiss under the downpour
until we’re soaked
like two huge nets
left
beside the sea
whose heavy old
ropes strain
stout with fish
If we had to we could
feed a multitude
with our sorrows
If we had to
we could name a loss
for every other
drop of rain All these
foreign flowers
you plant from pot
to plot
with muddy fingers
—passion, jasmine, tuberose—
we’ll sip
the dew from them
My darling here
is the door I promised
Here
is our broken bowl Here
my hands
In the home of our dreams
the windows open
in every
weather—doused
or dry—May we never
be so parched
Copyright © 2024 by Patrick Rosal. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 13, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo, or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—
But all of them sensible everyday names,
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum—
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name.
From Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Copyright © 1939 by T. S. Eliot, renewed © 1967 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Used with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Two years into anorexia recovery,
when I begin to miss dying more than ever,
my cat begins to hide.
She disappears for hours and I find her
hammocked in the lining of my couch.
She has hollowed it out with her teeth
and stares at me through cobwebbed eyes.
I am startled at my own anger.
After all the time and love I’ve given her,
I can’t forgive her turning away like this.
My partner reminds me that cats
do not know how to be cruel,
but they do know survival and fear.
Each day, I reach into the dark
mouth of the couch and pull her,
claws and all, back into life.
Weeks later, she dies with no one home.
I discover the body and the urge to blame
myself glows hot in my chest.
How could I let her die
in an empty house?
How could I be so cruel.
On the drive to donate her body,
my partner apologizes with every breath.
We pull over and he cries into my coat,
How could I let this happen?
And I know that if he feels guilty too,
maybe the blame belongs to neither of us.
This is the person who tried
to breathe life back into the cat’s corpse,
without realizing what he was doing.
He did it because his instincts told him to,
because every cell in his body is good.
For weeks, the memory will make him
shiver, gag, rinse the moment from his mouth.
This is the person who gave everything
to keep me alive, when letting me die
was the easiest thing to do.
He never stopped looking for me
when I hid in the hollows of myself and my heart
became a shadowy hallway of locked doors.
This is the person who, if I died
as the doctor said I would,
would surely blame himself,
and I would bang my phantom fists
against the plexiglass of the living world,
screaming No!
I did not die.
And when I was stuck in the hospital,
sobbing as I pictured him living our life alone,
I wrote him a letter asking how
he could ever forgive me.
He wrote back saying I would
rather miss you for a while
than miss you forever.
In the car now, he asks how
we’ll ever survive this
and I say Together.
Copyright © 2024 by Nen G. Ramirez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 11, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
I did not run away
I walked away by daylight
—Sojourner Truth
The hour I ran out
on my bondage I
didn’t run.
The sun was
Shining in its
Sunday’s best,
beating its coat
on my coat. This
heat produced my
sweat, not swift
feet. My haircut,
new. & my hat
wore ribbons
fit a church
frontrow. A day so
ordinary who could
guess
what I walked
away from? How
could I be anyone
but me,
with my name in
my teeth? My feet
gliding under each
detective’s lowered
brim. The bounty
on my head
higher than hawk
circles.
The night I walked
out on my master
is when I learned
I was serving one.
The same molar
chiding my cheeks
a mole engorging
silence. My first
spy the dream in
my
brain entrenching
ownership. I spent
12,000 treks
thinking my
moves were my
own until I found
road stretching out
of a forest I hadn’t
even seen grow.
When I arrived
at the brush &
flatland I knew
where I had been
had not been mine,
but a life for my
first love. The first
who gave my
selfness a ceiling.
How could I have
not chosen my
maker before
choosing myself?
The night I walked
out on my master
wasn’t night
at all. Freedom
made the day
ordinary in a new
way. How for a
fish water is never
new, just a change
between bodies.
But if a child
exits
my chute gravity is
law, & down
becomes a
direction.
The first time my
feet touched floor I
learned the bottom.
After,
I took my legs &
forged a path
between a past &
Jupiter.
Now time can’t
touch me & I’m
where water is
always fresh
though it pains like
we do. Where pine
trees grow w/ no
hunting season is
where I am headed.
A compass w/ no
map is the stars.
Find your way. If I
told you the
address
It wouldn’t be a
secret.
Copyright © 2024 by Nabila Lovelace. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 14, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
to estimate one’s position
without instruments
or celestial observations
calculating direction and distance
traveled from the last known fix
while accounting for tides, currents, grief
drift numbness
sudden storms of pain
unexpected joy
to reckon is to believe
something true
to reckon with the dead
is to believe I can know them
an airy thinness
gleaming
despite
the distance
traveled
I’d like to know how far
I’ve gone
how much farther there is
to go how absence
unfathomable
becomes
something I can carry
Copyright © 2024 by Hyejung Kook. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 16, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.