When the grapevine had thinned
but not broken & the worst was yet to come
of winter snow, I tracked my treed heart
to the high boughs of a quaking
aspen & shot it down.
If love comes fast,
let her be a bullet & not a barking dog;
let my heart say, as that trigger’s pulled,
Are all wonders small? Otherwise, let love
be a woman of gunpowder
& lead; let her
arrive a brass angel, a dark powdered comet
whose mercy is dense as the fishing sinker
that pulleys the moon, even when it is heavy
with milk. I shot my heart
& turned myself in
to wild kindness, left the road to my coffin
that seemed also to include my carrying it & walked
back along the trampled brush I remembered
only as a blur of hot breath & a howling in my chest.
From Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014). Copyright © 2014 by Meg Day. Used with the permission of the author.
For Laquan McDonald
I think it’s quails lining the road but it's fallen Birchwood.
What look like white clouds in a grassy basin, sprinklers.
I mistake the woman walking her retriever as a pair of fawns.
Could-be animals. Unexplained weather. Maybe they see us
that way. Knowing better, the closer they get. Not quite ready to let it go.
Copyright © 2020 by Rio Cortez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 8, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
In Greek, amphibian means
“on both sides of life.”
As in: amphibians live
on land and in water.
As in: immigrants leave
lands and cross waters.
While amphibians lay
shell-less eggs,
immigrants give birth
to Americans.
In water, gilled tadpoles
sprout limbs. On land
amphibians develop lungs.
Immigrants develop lungs.
Breathe in pine, fuel
and cold atmosphere.
Amphibians’ damp
skin oxygenates.
Immigrants toil
and slumber deathly.
Their colors brighten.
They camouflage.
They’ve been known to fall
out of the sky.
Completely at home
in the rain.
Copyright © 2014 by Joseph O. Legaspi. Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.
When I got it wrong at school—missed a word, could not recite the long division tables—I would lock my knees beneath my little plywood desk in back where all the tall ones sat, and sneak my uniform sleeve up and bite down on my forearm, make myself keep quiet, doing that, not crying; gnashing hard with my gapped teeth until the dotted "O" sunk in because I couldn’t hold my breath, so had to clench my skin while no sobs flayed my lungs: those lightless rooms where loud girls kept themselves, and stayed unsorry.
Copyright © 2005 Frannie Lindsay. From Where She Always Was. Used with permission of Utah State University Press.
I wake to a knife on the back of my neck, a man's voice low in my ear. What I am told to do, I do. Still the moon lights my room. The freight of his chest fixes me to the rough, wood floor. His breath brags down my throat into my lungs, and I pray for my soul. I make of my body a bunker: when he enters, he does not touch me. I am clean as rain.
Copyright © 2000 by Sondra Upham. Reprinted from Freight with the permission of the poet and of Slapering Hol Press--A project of The Hudson Valley Writers' Center. All rights reserved.
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.
Tonight, as you undress, I watch your wondrous
flesh that’s swelled again, the way a river swells
when the ice relents. Sweet relief
just to regard the sheaves of your hips,
your boundless breasts and marshy belly.
I adore the acreage
of your thighs and praise the promising
planets of your ass.
O, you were lean that terrifying year
you were unraveling, as though you were returning
to the slender scrap of a girl I fell in love with.
But your skin was vacant, a ripped sack,
sugar spilling out and your bones insistent.
O praise the loyalty of the body
that labors to rebuild its palatial realm.
Bless butter. Bless brie.
Sanctify schmaltz. And cream and cashews.
Stoke the furnace
of the stomach and load the vessels. Darling,
drench yourself in opulent oil,
the lamp of your body glowing. May you always
flourish enormous and sumptuous,
be marbled with fat, a great vault that
I can enter, the cathedral where I pray.
From Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) by Ellen Bass. Copyright © 2020 by Ellen Bass. Used with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.