there must be one thing you can’t have in order to be alive
watching flowers open on youtube
I mean, my life is wasted on my life
requirement is simple
it takes a wound to
return to yourself
the new sky
is the same as the old one
its achy maw
its barbwire grip
people are whatever they are next to
that won’t remember them
a dumb desert
a broken open sign
whatever I love best
reminds me of something else
Copyright © 2021 by Jon-Michael Frank. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 11, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets
In the beginning, there was your mouth:
soft rose, rose murmur, murmured breath, a warm
cardinal wind that drew my needle north.
Magnetic flux, the press of form to form.
In the beginning, there was your mouth—
the trailhead, the pathhead faintly opened,
the canyon, river-carved, farther south,
and ahead: the field, the direction chosen.
In the beginning, there was your mouth,
a sky full of stars, raked or raking, clock-
wise or west, and in the close or mammoth
matter, my heart’s red muscle, knocked and knocked.
In the beginning, there was your mouth,
And nothing since but what the earth bears out.
Copyright © 2021 by Donika Kelly. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 26, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.