I do think of them
from time to time—
just now sucking the pulp
of a tangerine
the taste of which
is mostly texture,
in this spin-drunk season
that seems to forget
—us. —itself.
At the job I lost,
their husk carcasses
with the locust bean’s
cracked brown pods
rustled on the brick steps
leading into the white-walled
hours of computer screen;
their compressed toil
missing from the hives
they left agape in the backyard
of the next-door neighbor
who, recently divorced,
had brought us the jars
of honey I spooned into teas
I sipped in the break room
and watched at the window
as he continued to tend
the needle palm and hydrangea.
In the age of loss there is
the dream of loss
in which, of course, I
am alive at the center—
immobile but no one’s queen—
enveloped (beloved) in bees,
swathed in their wings’
wistful enterprise. They pry
the evolved thin eyelids
behind which I replay
the landscape as last I knew it
(crow feathers netting redder suns),
their empire’s droning edge
mindless in the spirals of
my obsolescing ears.
Beneath my feet
what kind of earth
I’m terrified to break
into sprint across to free
myself, to free them
from the myth they make
of me and then bury
below their dance
of manufactory;
what kind of future
they could die for if
punching into me their stings—
what future without risking
the same; and while, in either body
the buzzards of hunger conspire,
what kind of new
dread animal,
this shape we take?
Copyright © 2018 by Justin Phillip Reed. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 1, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
for Dad I’m writing you 10 years later & 2,000 miles Away from Our silence My mouth a cave That had collapsed I’m writing While you You wear the Hospital gown & count failures Such as the body’s Inability to rise I see your fingers Fumbling in the Pillbox as if Earthquakes are in Your hands I think it’s time For us to abandon Our cruelties For us to speak So s o f t We’re barely Human.
Copyright © 2018 by Christopher Soto. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 2, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Why the image just now of a bullet entering the mouth? Why call it raw, when it isn’t sticky and pink like a turkey meatball, just the usual: gold, and shiny, and cylindrical? What about this bullet is uncooked? Why does it multiply with you in parka or short skirt, versions of the you that you were, swallowing raw bullets as you walked? The images come without assailant, without gun, just the holes the bullets opened, the holes through which they went. And now at the age in which you ride enclosed in glass like the Pope or President you are spitting up the bullets slow-simmered in your own juices. You are shitting them out, feeling them drop from you in clumps of blood, in the days of bleeding left. But you cannot expel all of them. Some, raw as the day they entered, have expanded their mushroom heads into the flesh, or lodged their hot tip into the taste center of the brain. Will the tongue’s first encounter with pomegranate seeds be forever a lost Eden, that fruit of your girlhood, which, also meaning grenade, was perhaps never innocent? Do your own raw bullets come back to you, my friends? Let us legislate the active voice, instead. Not, “Many bodies have been used as blanks, aluminum cans.” But, “Here are the men who pulled the trigger, look at them.”
Copyright © 2018 by Rosa Alcalá. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 5, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Pleasure is black.
I no longer imagine
where my body
stops or begins.
Skin transparent.
Face speckled
by the spit
of several centuries.
All the borders stare at the same fires.
Oh Mamere,
I'm sorry.
Here I am.
Copyright © 2018 by Robin Coste Lewis. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 6, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Bob: Can I be your lazy eye, your wander- lust, your grave without a headstone, your bleeding gums, your buck teeth and your walk bowlegged at the knee? Can I be your fortune hunter, your glimpse of wild geese, your red russet shoes that poison the feet? Reckon this is the best of my seed. Been stripping cane and blind robbing the bees. Reckon you’ve thought of swimming the creek. Last night they came on horseback, white hoods like phantoms scanning the trees, burning torches, shattering sleep. I dragged the shotgun from the door and stepped squinting onto the porch.
Copyright © 2018 by Lauren Russell. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 7, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
The removal of aliens who pose [ ] shall be ICE’s high [ ] These aliens include [ ] engaged in or suspected of [ ] or who otherwise pose [ ] aliens convicted of [ ] particular emphasis [ ] and repeat aliens [ ] who participated [ ] [ ] subject to outstanding [ ] who otherwise pose [ ] to public safety. Aliens who are [ ] otherwise obstruct [ ] fugitive aliens, in descending priority as [ ] aliens who pose [ ] security; [ ] or who otherwise pose [ ] the community; [ ] other than [ ]; and [ ] who have not been [ ]; aliens who reenter [ ] in descending priority as [ ] aliens who pose [ ] previously removed [ ] who other- wise pose [ ] to the community; previously removed [ ] who have not been convicted of [ ] who obtain admission or status by [ ] ; otherwise [
Copyright © 2018 by David Buuck. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 8, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
There are poets with history and poets without history, Tsvetsaeva claimed living
through the ruin of Russia.
Karina says disavow every time I see her. We, the daughters between countries,
wear our mean mothers like scarves around our necks.
Every visit, mine recounts all the wrongs done against her
ring sent for polishing returned with a lesser diamond, Years of never rest and,
she looks at me, of nothing to be proud of.
I am covered in welts and empty pockets so large sobs escape me in the backroom of
my Landlord's fabric shop. He moves to wipe my tears
as if I’m his daughter
or I’m no one’s daughter.
It’s true, I let him take my hand, I am a girl who needs something. I slow cook bone
grief, use a weak voice.
My mother calls me the girl with holes in her hands, every time I lose something.
All Russian daughters were snowflakes once, and in their hair a ribbon long
as their body knotted and knotted and knotted into a large translucent bow.
It happens, teachers said, that a child between countries will refuse to speak.
A girl with a hole in her throat, every day I opened the translation book.
Silent, I took my shoes off when I came home, I
put my house clothes on.
We had no songs, few rituals. On Yom Kippur, we lit a candle for the dead
and no one knew a prayer.
We kept the candle lit, that’s all.
The wave always returns, and always returns a different wave.
I was small. I built a self outside my self because a child needs shelter.
Not even you knew I was strange,
I ate the food my family ate, I answered to my name.
Copyright © 2018 by Gala Mukomolova. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 9, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
How-to with a wolf head in it: magic says rub tooth to your gum, sleep with cheek matted to your sweat—first you must kill it. Post a letter of carved wood that sings like howl. What happens after the cast—where to dispose of used up fur coil and red. Kept saying new when I had looked for nothing. There’s a whole word for wind in France, northeast and dry; I have not been given one to say how canvas cuts a tree’s bottom and top with grey poplars. My stretch of cells still repeating. The nuns made my body a holy cathedral, impenetrable—yet a temple is a widest entrance; place of herded into. Still have a wolf and it’s still breathing. From its mouth crawls another. Then from that, it happens again; throat combed by teeth. It became we and I was a portrait with many hearts in it.
Copyright © 2018 by Lucia LoTempio. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 12, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
There is a time and place in the world for abstraction. When my mother left Puerto Rico for the first time, the year was 1968. Against my unknowing. We hesitate to say what intimacy is and whether or not we have it. I keep trying / to teach my students that / stream-of-consciousness is / this, not that / this / activity fails. We know it does because each of us leaves the room / feeling like barbed wire— snarling behind the barricade (because) at some point, we stopped feeling (like language could say). So we went without while some others embraced. Notice (after the emptiness) : a pain that is not private. In other words, focus not on the object, but rather, the light that bounces off of that object. Perforated. Estranged. Esa luz. Tómatela. Under that light° I felt my body try / to hold on (to the knot inside) your right hand; when did it become a fist? Remind me what it is again / what it is that you wish / to share (with others) >> when you’re on stage… °That light, this pain (what never translates).
Copyright © 2018 by Lara Mimosa Montes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 13, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
—after Alejandra Pizarnik A yellow scraping across my skin when I write the word “sky” Not sky but scything : to let day be scraped out by night I scratched down the word “flower” & felt the parts draw away from the tongue. Not gnomon, grown*man, but ghost : to gnaw on the crisp skin once it’s been stripped down from the meat the neat meat hiding under the table of the skin’s tablatures right at the juncture where day/night meet you can see it indicated by the perforated lines what parts of us that don’t cast a shadow
Copyright © 2018 by Eleni Sikélianòs. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 15, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Your songs are the impossible ruins that keep the hours on turn. Keep awe bare like sound at night. The candle burn. Ice melts and wax. The dirt on your mind. Engines roll in clutter. Clank cool and electrify the room. We always become mysterious— birds at the end of each evening. Whoever does the telling stops time like a crescendo. We hit blue notes so the edges of your honey jars rattle laughter against our teeth. Rhythm breaks like need or the knowledge a mouth organ has about breath and tone, blood and gravity and balance— all those sweet sounds that can make even windows shatter.
Copyright © 2018 by Soham Patel. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 16, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
& of the lattermath I can only say that with the rain the cattails grew so high that the longing nearly subsided this morning I am all moonshine on the snowbank clockwise back to a better self I am tenderfoot daisywheel though yesterday I was warpath and daydreams of underfoot animals o my fishhook in sheepskin I want to spacewalk in time with you to teaspoon sugar into your mouth to clean horsehairs from under your fingernails honeymoon of the longhouse I’ll meet you on the shadyside of the limestone for years I grew lukewarm with a backache but now I am whitefish and blackberries I am forbearer and undercurrent buttermilk and motherhood watertight thunderbird forgive me my wipeout my deadend and foremost forgive me my butterball my washrag wrung out the grasslands of the graveyard I nearly misrecognized what I almost became eggshell watercolor drained pipe goodbye o my forever bedclothes yours is the body warmblooded washbowl that I seahorse into night after night and the dogwood timepiece ticks the gumball fruitcup earache of our girls you my wavelength my tailbone lemonlime jellybean crewcut backstroke beachcomber I do I do
Copyright © 2018 by Nicole Callihan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 19, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Like love: first you pick up; then you lay down; then discard; then discard; then discard. That’s love. Right? Did somebody say Dominoes? The problem of a street game is you. You’re already doing it wrong. Doing it wrong before you wake up. Before you walk up the street. Cross the crowded corner. Case in point: When you reach the bones table, you stop. Stare. Consider. Count. Think: This is a lovely afternoon for a friendly game of dominoes! Call next. Figure they don’t hear. Call next again. You call louder. You call in Spanish. Then you walk (again, with the walking) into the bodega. Come out with four 40oz bottles. Suddenly somebody hears. Suddenly the smell of holes burning pockets. Suddenly, the game you watch ends. Like love. Right? Somebody?
Copyright © 2018 by Samiya Bashir. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 20, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
I could string him back up the tree, if you’d like.
Return his skin’s meaning to an easy distance, coal dust, blaze
And Willie Brown him. You
Love how the blood muddies the original,
The way it makes a stage of my speechifying, this leeching
Capital from his dying,
Like an activist. I know
I’m not supposed to sing
Of his ringing
Penetrability, some hole I open impose
On the form—but all I see is bullets, bullets discerning him,
As years ago it was rope.
I could pull it tighter, finger each bullet deeper,
If you’d like, an inch rougher,
Far enough to where becomes that second heat, erotic.
I could use the erotic,
If you’d like,
So ungarish, baring not too frank
A mood, subtle so you need it.— Funny
How some dark will move illicit if you close your eyes,
The way, say, my black
Pleasure is named too explicit for a page, but this menace
I put in it is not.
I could yank and knot
The rope, if you’d like, him like a strange fragment
In them trees,
And the word “again” spelled out about his neck
Would be the rope’s predicate till let wild, patterned and
Fierce his moan.
It is a tragedy. No. It is a sonnet, how I know
Already how he ends,
But I could make him
Her, if you’d like, regender them till merely
Canvas for your “empathy,”
Soup for my mouth. Still, if I could but just get
This blunt,
Burnt lynched body up
From on
Out the pocket behind my eye
All trees could be themselves again, all sound.
Copyright © 2018 by Rickey Laurentiis. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 21, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
February on another coast is April
here. Astrology is months:
you are February, or are you
June, and who is
December? Who is books
read in spring, wingspan
between midnight
and mourning
Another starry tree, coastal
counterpoint where magnolia is
a brighter season
peach and pear
are grafted onto the same tree
fear and fat stick
to the same sprained bone
For this adolescent reprise
recycle everything trivial
but this time bring
the eye into sight:
make sight superior
to what is seen
A decade is to look at June
and see April
to look at April
and see February
Relief of repetition
seasons mean again,
one flowering branch suspended
in the half-light of spring
We sat on steps
beneath a tree
No: I walked by
The tree bloomed
and I looked up
Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer Hayashida. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 22, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
1. I wear my grandmother’s bones like a housedress through the city. Some nights the block tells me all its problems. I’ll meet you at the top of the biggest rock in Rolesville or on train headed to a reading in Queens, just tell me where. I promise to gather your bones only for good. I was not swallowed by the darkness between two buildings. I don’t want to die in the south like so many of mine. I want to be carried back. 2. I dreamed we were digging in a field in Rolesville looking for an earth we knew the name of. You stepped into the hole, looked behind you and gestured me in. I saw every lover who held you while your children slept in rooms of small heaters, you wrap the blankets so tight, afraid of any cold that might get in. 3. I said my goodbyes, my dead will not come. I will not see a cardinal in the city so I drew one on my chest. A coop inside a coop inside of me. Leaving is necessary some say. There is a whole ocean between you and a home you can’t fix your tongue to speak. Others do not want me no further than a length of a small yard, they ask where are you going Tyree? Your mama here, you’ve got stars in your eyes. A ship in your movement.
Copyright © 2018 by Tyree Daye. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 23, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
you’re embarrassed by your own om
you say—planning your funeral
considering deep drones
only a limited number of patterns
exist for such a song
played in one breath
a prayer for a pregnant woman’s easy delivery
a tender preamble for a new instrument
a piece played for expressing gratitude
a state of mind resembling moonlight
a lighter one for festive occasions
a piece for overcoming difficulties that could have been handled better
a piece representing manifestations of self-discipline
an offering at a service for the dead
a piece expressing longing for home
if there are indeed
“still songs to sing beyond mankind”
we’ll need those
now
Copyright © 2018 by Jen Bervin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 26, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
When you said people did you mean punish?
When you said friend did you mean fraud?
When you said thought did you mean terror?
When you said connection did you mean con?
When you said God did you mean greed?
When you said faith did you mean fanatic?
When you said hope did you mean hype?
When you said unity did you mean enmity?
When you said freedom did you mean forfeit?
When you said law did you mean lie?
When you said truth did you mean treason?
When you said feeling did you mean fool?
When you said together did you mean token?
When you said desire did you mean desert?
When you said sex did you mean savagery?
When you said need did you mean nought?
When you said blood did you mean bought?
When you said heart did you mean hard?
When you said head did you mean hide?
When you said health did you mean hurt?
When you said love did you mean loss?
When you said fate did you mean fight?
When you said destiny did you mean decimate?
When you said honor did you mean hunger?
When you said bread did you mean broke?
When you said feast did you mean fast?
When you said first did you mean forgotten?
When you said last did you mean least?
When you said woman did you mean wither?
When you said man did you mean master?
When you said mother did you mean smother?
When you said father did you mean fatal?
When you said sister did you mean surrender?
When you said brother did you mean brutal?
When you said fellow did you mean follow?
When you said couple did you mean capital?
When you said family did you mean failure?
When you said mankind did you mean market?
When you said society did you mean sickness?
When you said democracy did you mean indignity?
When you said equality did you mean empty?
When you said politics did you mean power?
When you said left did you mean lost?
When you said right did you mean might?
When you said republic did you mean rich?
When you said wealthy did you mean wall?
When you said poor did you mean prison?
When you said justice did you mean just us?
When you said immigrant did you mean enemy?
When you said refugee did you mean refusal?
When you said earth did you mean ownership?
When you said soil did you mean oil?
When you said community did you mean conflict?
When you said safety did you mean suspicion?
When you said security did you mean sabotage?
When you said army did you mean Armageddon?
When you said white did you mean welcome?
When you said black did you mean back?
When you said yellow did you mean yield?
When you said brown did you mean down?
When you said we did you mean war?
When you said you did you mean useless?
When you said she did you mean suffer?
When you said he did you mean horror?
When you said they did you mean threat?
When you said I did you mean island?
When you said tribe did you mean trouble?
When you said name did you mean nobody?
When you said news did you mean nonsense?
When you said media did you mean miasma?
When you said success did you mean sucker?
When you said fame did you mean game?
When you said ideal did you mean idol?
When you said yesterday did you mean travesty?
When you said today did you mean doomsday?
When you said tomorrow did you mean never?
When you said hear did you mean hush?
When you said listen did you mean limit?
When you said write did you mean wound?
When you said read did you mean retreat?
When you said literacy did you mean apathy?
When you said fiction did you mean forget?
When you said poetry did you mean passivity?
When you say art do you mean act?
Copyright © 2018 by John Keene. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 27, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Copyright © 2018 by Duriel E. Harris. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 28, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.