There is one atop each of the Girls’ heads. Clearly they have been playing this game for a while. There is only one girl whose turkey is still full of air, and that girl is Girl D. The game is called Duck, Duck, Turkey. They go through the motions of having an “it,” and having that “it” walk around the outside of the circle of sitting girls, tapping them on their turkey heads while saying, “duck, duck, duck, duck...” until they say “turkey!” while hitting the turkey on the head of a girl and then running around the circle, trying to sit down in the open spot in the circle before getting tagged. The general stance over here is based on the unshakeable belief that playing this game is going to lead to a better, more just society for all, once everybody’s turkey is equally deflated. And although most of the turkeys are, indeed, mostly deflated, none of the girls can keep themselves from glancing furtively at the head of Girl D, her hair positively radiant in the light bouncing off of the almost fully inflated rubber turkey on her head. How can this be? What is wrong with everyone else’s turkey? Did Girl D get a refill? Or more air than others to begin with? Is that really a turkey? Maybe Girl D’s turkey is not made out of rubber like the rest. What if the rubber turkey of Girl D was filled with turkey?
Copyright © 2018 by Sawako Nakayasu. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 21, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.
We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—
Or rather—He passed us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—
Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—
Poetry used by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
1
Muddled stillness
All summer
Sun
Punched the yellow jacket nest
Cavernous paper
Valved like a parched heart
Over and over
I let it
Beat outside
My body
No dark to cradle
The living part
2
The glare sears seeing
Something moves out of the corner
Often it is more nothing
Tumbling
From its silk sack.
This stillness
Shifts. Streak
Of tiny particulars
Pained in relation: the experience still
So still
It is invisible?
It will settle, I will tell you
Where the edges belong
3
River
That bare aspiring edge
That killing arrow
Feathered from its
Own wing
Then the third
River forms
When pain’s lit
Taper
Drips
Soft lip
Of my vision
Effacing, radiates
A late, silty light
My life
Slowly bottoming
Into thought
Copyright © 2018 by Michelle Gil-Montero. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 15, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
imagine your heart is just a ball you learned to dribble up
and down the length of your driveway back home. slow down
control it. plant your feet in the soft blue of your mat and release
it is hard but slowly you are unlearning the shallow pant
of your childhood. extend your body—do not reach
for someone but something fixed and fleshless and certain—
fold flatten then lift your head like a cobra sure of the sun
waiting and ready to caress the chill
from its scales. inhale—try not to remember how desperate
you’ve been for touch—yes ignore it—that hitch of your heart
you got from mornings you woke to find momma hysterical
or gone. try to give up the certainty she’d never return
recall only the return and not its coldness. imagine her arms
wide to receive you imagine you are not a thing that needs
escaping. it is hard and though at times you are sure
you will always be the abandoned girl trying to abandon herself
push up arch deep into your back exhale and remember—
when it is too late to pray the end of the flood
we pray instead to survive it.
Copyright © 2018 by Brionne Janae. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 22, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
because you’re psychic
no one else could understand me
the way you
do and
I say
Drink Me
I say it to you silently
but it calls forth in me
the water for you
the water you asked for
Copyright © 2015 by Rebecca Wolff. Used with permission of the author.
Or sometimes watched drifting with the leaves,
some last confetti of yellow or brown. Or it existed
the way the juncos huddled beneath the thistle
feeder in winter, in the way the clouds spilled water
in May to soak the ground. Once we found it
in the attic in a steamer trunk, and another time
we closed it in a suitcase and drove it across
the countryside to Ohio. And often we imagined that
the years were a locked door against which
we kept knocking to be admitted. And on the dresser
of the new house, I spilled the change of the marriage
into a heap, and later we sat on the back porch and watched
the nuptial clouds on their conveyor belts. And we slept
at night with the breaths of the marriage around us.
Copyright © 2018 Doug Ramspeck. This poem originally appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Summer 2018. Used with permission of the author.