We trace the dust lines left behind from the appliances, fumble for the brick foundations between the steel beams, peer at serrated stairlines where the wall paints stopped. Reincarnated. Tenement apartments become dance spaces without barres or mirrors, in the dank basement of a bank on Market Street, in anonymous green-carpeted rooms on Mott Street.
Copyright © 2017 by Celina Su. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 5, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Copyright © 2017 by Lynn Melnick. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 26, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
The boy found hanging on the golf course.
The boy with the bruises, who’d arrive
to school coatless in the middle of winter.
The man with the red face and the thick stutter
who cleaned up our vomit in grade school.
The veteran who spoke to the seventh grade,
confessed how scared he’d been and wept.
The cousin who disappeared completely
after she refused to eat anything but olives.
The mother who was a drunk. The father
who told us all he was an undercover cop
and that’s why he had the gun. The boy
who got shot. The boy who got cancer
in both legs, his angry dad, his frail sisters.
Why we never got responses to our get well
soon cards, the mute teachers continuing
their lessons plans. What happened
to that hungry black dog who’d bolt
through the school yard, the one
that refused to stay leashed.
Copyright © 2010 by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz. “Things We Didn’t Talk About” originally appeared in Everything Is Everything (Write Bloody Publishing, 2010). Used with permission of the author.
Turns out things aren’t going that well.
Turns out you wake up and you’re thirty,
and the clothes you are wearing aren’t ironic
anymore. They are the clothes you wear.
One day you wake up, and look in your closet
and realize it is every terrible thing your mother
ever said to you, all cut from 100% poly-blend.
These are the days your shoes dissolve in the rain,
the days your boss asks if that’s a hole in your pants,
and you don’t even have to look down to confirm.
These are the days you pin a poem to the page
just to see it stare back at you, gasping for air.
Copyright © 2004 by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz. “Close Out Sale” originally appeared in Working Class Represent (Write Bloody Publishing, 2004). Used with permission of the author.
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.