dear reader, with our heels digging into the good mud at a swamp’s edge, you might tell me something about the dandelion & how it is not a flower itself but a plant made up of several small flowers at its crown & lord knows I have been called by what I look like more than I have been called by what I actually am & I wish to return the favor for the purpose of this exercise. which, too, is an attempt at fashioning something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything worthwhile of their burial. size me up & skip whatever semantics arrive to the tongue first. say: that boy he look like a hollowed-out grandfather clock. he look like a million-dollar god with a two-cent heaven. like all it takes is one kiss & before morning, you could scatter his whole mind across a field.
Copyright © 2018 by Hanif Abdurraqib. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 4, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
They descend from the boat two by two. The gap in Angela Davis’s teeth speaks to the gap in James Baldwin’s teeth. The gap in James Baldwin’s teeth speaks to the gap in Malcolm X’s Teeth. The gap in Malcolm X’s teeth speaks to the gap in Malcolm X’s teeth. The gap in Condoleezza Rice’s teeth doesn’t speak. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard kisses the Band Aid on Nelly’s cheek. Frederick Douglass’s side part kisses Nikki Giovanni’s Thug Life tattoo. The choir is led by Whoopi Goldberg’s eyebrows. The choir is led by Will Smith’s flat top. The choir loses its way. The choir never returns home. The choir sings funeral instead of wedding, sings funeral instead of allegedly, sings funeral instead of help, sings Black instead of grace, sings Black as knucklebone, mercy, junebug, sea air. It is time for war.
Copyright © 2018 by Morgan Parker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 2, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
When they finished burying me, what was left of me
sent up a demand like a hand blooming in the fresh dirt:
When I’m back, I want a body like a slash of lightning.
If they heard me, I couldn’t hear their answers.
But silence has never stopped me from praying.
Alive, how many nights did I spend knelt between
the knees of gods and men begging for rain, rent,
and reasons to remain? A body like the sky seeking
justice. A body like light reaching right down into the field
where you thought you could hide from me.
They’ve taken their bald rose stems and black umbrellas
home now. They’ve cooked for one another, sung hymns
as if they didn’t prefer jazz. I’m just a memory now.
But history has never stopped me from praying.
Copyright © 2018 by Saeed Jones. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 28, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
with David Rothenberg, Nicola Hein, George Lewis, Dafna Naphtali, Andrew Drury, Tanya Kalmanovich, Hans Tammen, Sarah Weaver, David Grubbs, and Ally-Jane Grossan
Logistics sounds like a work song. The bottom anticipates and tills and then it’s time to turn over. This limbned, uncoordinated independence is anagnostic. Flesh touches. I am because we are is some bullshit. I ain’t because we share air lore, more notes on Auto da Fé’s blacking of the presence of an absence. The abyss between frames, that dehiscence, indicates this refusal either to fuse or choose between tearing and binding, a careful preservation of wounding. The whole fade in a shuffle it projects and prepares, a soufflé of angles, a palimpsest of snares and rides, some continually hidden h, a heft of air, a thievish shift carnival, a tufted shear, a shhhh of whirr and bookfan. We wear a fan of books, page over other kissing inside lip to disappear into another outside in coming into view. We all come from nothing to hard tone row and that cool move, chafing against the new phasis of the history of displacement, sound like it got a three on it to me. Blackness is the revelation of that which makes a people uncertain, unclear and awry in its action and knowledge. I think I been thinking ‘bout that for ‘bout thirty years, Krupa become Krupskaya having lost their aura, but when I get a chance I ask Scott La Rock why I start to think and then I sink into the paper like I was ink, like I was a Chinese painter in the hold of the beholding. The zero degree is what he says; she says nothing in reply, a festival, irreparable. The age of quantum mechanical reproduction is giving tune away to rise. Collaborate elaboration, William. Infinite consanguinity, Dumbo. Fleeta Drum came with us, brought something with him, brought a swing with her to fold the document. Can improvisation be documented? Has it ever been? Lemme ask Scott when I see him—see if improvisation can be revised. Scott, can improvisation be revised? That’s an arctic jazz question, regarding whales and, further inland, elephants, and saxophone kids, non-expert users, autodidactic squirrels in task decomposition. Is there an analogy between improvisation and optimization, affirmation and ingardenation on improvisational gardening? What’s the Greek word for “reading”? Which is the point of all this rub and cyclone, when the eye falls into plenitude in a series of caressive abuse and kisses, oikopolitics and storms, good and bad time weather in a tore up propagation of clicks, which is when I realized you’d prepared the back of our throat for a speech about the tragic ship, the interminable line to it and the endless line from it, woodskin, wind’s skin, wound and drumbone, bowed, time to stay, string, till poise come back for poise, for our unsupported method and post-sculptural stuttering and non-purposive black massive hymn and sold, celebratory subcanadian scotchplain, plummets of bird patterning, the scotchirish hazarding of north ideas, habitually prenational birds, field recordings of syncrudescent birds flew down to tailing in the good and bad time weather, bird in the collective head of mama’nem at the blues university, Clyde’n’mama’nem and her and ask and think a digital conference of the birds, viola, ‘cause music is the fruit of love and earth and nobody gon’ buy it anyway, for there is nothing lost, that may be found in these findings, by these foundlings, driving ‘round vising and revisiting in the inescapable history of not being you. Our name is unnameable in this regard and miles ahead, feeling what you can’t see all incompletely. The half-fullness of your glasses makes you wanna make the word go away but you do have a capacity for massage that gives me hope. In the delicate evening software, I can understand Russell Westbrook. It’s ulmeric, oliveirian, in its unfirewalled all over the placelessness. We gig everywhere and it just makes me wanna giggle, or holler at you from way over here, party over there, if you can wait, we being behind the beat a little bit but right at the beguining, gynomonastically basic and maternal earth tones all out from the tone world, deep in the bass loom, twilight weaving morning in La Jolla/moonlight in Vermont someplace, some folks parking, some just getting dressed, everybody waiting with everybody for right now in right there, party over here. Well moled, old Grubbs! We all here in the ruins but we got something in our hands—an experimental bandcamp for news and flowers. And I appreciate y’all letting me sit in, being so far from virtuosity. I wanna be communicable from way back. I wanna be in your base community, grace abounding to the chief of sinners. Remember that song by the Spinners called “Sadie”? The one on Spinners Live! where he reverted—that contrapulsive, not just knee-deep conversioning he got caught up in? Soul Wynne was sewing that night. It was like he had a drum in his chest, just to let you know that nothing lasts forever. The improvisation of forgetting is redactive flow everyday with all these voices in our head. These are always revising herself. One said they told us to be Germanic so, with great surprise, we took a picture of your tech with yourself, our constraint, and it was undecidable between us but plantational, since we the police of different voices, to be your instrument in this sovereign fade. Go back and look at it again when we fade a little bit, when invention won’t let us come up on it from behind. I don’t know my own stuff well enough to mix it right now, but we been remixing it all along past the everyday fade. Mama’nem are the different voices in your head. Are you gon’ play me now? I wan be played with you. I wanna be down with you. My code voice is Stanley Clarke, rajautomatic mixive for the people’s quartet, no way to control it, can’t caul it, won’t be covered, some uncoverable cuvée, girl, some prekripkean cupcake, causally unnameable as that Krupa keep coming back, tense but casually anafrican. Scott says the Greek word for reading is writing. It could be, I don’t know. I’m undecidable between us but you can ring my bell. The night is young and full of possibilities, the only trace of which, when I go back, is how I sound for you from one diffusion to another, as if the room were our hijab, as if we were a roomful of people writing about Cecil Taylor, as if writing about Cecil were reading James Cone, as if I were Sharon Cone’s escort to Cecil’s going home, as if we were the temporary contemporary—air above mountains, buildings in our hands.
Copyright © 2018 by Fred Moten. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 20, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
It turns out however that I was deeply
Mistaken about the end of the world
The body in flames will not be the body
In flames but just a house fire ignored
The black sails of that solitary burning
Boat rubbing along the legs of lovers
Flung into a Roman sky by a carousel
The lovers too sick in their love
To notice a man drenched in fire on a porch
Or a child aflame mistaken for a dog
Mistaken for a child running to tell of a bomb
That did not knock before it entered
In Gaza with its glad tidings of abundant joy
In Kazimierz a god is weeping
In a window one golden hand raised
Above his head as if he’s slipped
On the slick rag of the future our human
Kindnesses unremarkable as the flies
Rubbing their legs together while standing
On a slice of cantaloupe Children
You were never meant to be human
You must be the grass
You must grow wildly over the graves
Copyright © 2018 by Roger Reeves. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 19, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
If there’s one true thing, it’s that Google will make money off us no matter what. If we want to know what percentage of America is white (as it seems we do) what percentage of the population is gay (as it seems we do) what percentage of the earth is water: the engine is ready for our desire. The urgent snow is everywhere is a line by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many have asked, apparently, where am I right now. Also when will I die. Do you love me may be up there, generating high cost-per-click, but not as high as how to make pancakes, what time is it in California. So many things I wanted to ask you, now that you’re gone, and your texts bounce back to me undeliverable. Praise to the goddess of the internet search, who returns with her basket of grain, 67,000 helpful suggestions to everything we request: how to solve a Rubik’s Cube, what to do when you’re bored, how old is the earth, how to clear cache, what animal am I, why do we dream, where are you now, come back.
Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Richardson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 15, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Poem in which I have wisdom. Poem in which I have a father. Poem in which I care. Poem in which I am from another country. Poem in which I Spanish. Poem in which flowers are important. Poem in which I make pretty gestures. Poem in which I am a Deceptacon. Poem in which I am a novelist. Poem in which I use trash. Poem in which I am a baby. Poem in which I swaddle. Poem in which I bathe. Poem in which I am a box. Poem in which its face is everything. Poem in which faces are everywhere. Poem in which I swear. Poem in which I take an oath. Poem in which I make a joke. Poem in which I can’t move.
Copyright © 2018 by Paola Capó-García. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 12, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
—Wisława Szymborska
My handwriting is all over these woods.
No, my handwriting is these woods,
each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl,
each loop a limb. My house is somewhere
here, & I have scribbled myself inside it.
What is home but a book we write, then
read again & again, each time dog-earing
different pages. In the morning I wake
in time to pencil the sun high. How
fragile it is, the world—I almost wrote
the word but caught myself. Either one
could be erased. In these written woods,
branches smudge around me whenever
I take a deep breath. Still, written fawns
lie in the written sunlight that dapples
their backs. What is home but a passage
I’m writing & underlining every time I read it.
Copyright © 2018 by Maggie Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 8, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
QUANTUM STATE OF THE CONFLICT DIAMOND
STILL THROWING FIRE FROM THE PAGES OF YOUR NOTEBOOKS 1
At the harbor, in the smallest hour of this (Death stuff for sure), this softly tendered now, the Youngest Day, this silvery clarion blast: I have no distance. Free flow if you can through your very own little reckoning: 10 yrs. ago today, as of this attosecond: this area is not me. For I am sick unto death of your single deranged sense, so much light leaking away @2 minutes_ to_ midnight, that I feel outside my body just before the factory steam whistle has blasted all 3 of us away. As of that blooming, 2 minutes from here, 10 years away, you’re my only witness. & I’m yours, seconds from this drowned quantum (I feel fragmented) in which we’ve been entangled for years, seconds, days ago, forever. All I did was sink into my own brain which sucks the orange pregnant moonlight out of our wept corners, body inanimate, damp, dead— continue to bleed us into these saturated rooms. For I feel foreclosed. I feel you collapsed on the quiver, on the dive, on the sink. I feel edited but I don’t have the access code. For you tug at my trigger-finger just so. For the second shift of bodies has been long underway . . .
1 It’s Sunday night, Feb. 12, 1994 It’s been zero degrees all weekend. I’ve been having a lot of strange fantasies about buying a .38 special at a pawn shop. I’ll cut out the middle of some secret old book where it can be hidden.
Copyright © 2018 by Sam Witt. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 6, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
The diagnosis was god, twice a day until the spirit untangles itself. I took a trip into unscripted days past, teenagers submit to the window an open facing yawn. A walnut fell into the grave of my loved one and stayed there beating patient like a word. I was still unmoved by disbelief watching my father mumble the pledge and hot white stars he can’t remember. Nobody got hurt, some un- fulfilled potential exits the room. Enter, knowledge. Men came to dispel ambiguity and raced my intention to a hard boiling over. Each new decade we stayed was a misinterpretation of genre. We showed our teeth over the years to those who would listen. In the face of the absent subject I felt my desire go flaccid. The leaves fell dutifully one by one from their limbs. But I wrote to you against all odds. Money. Paperwork. Love’s heavy open door. Critique. Indignity. Vision and often enough time.
Copyright © 2018 by Wendy Xu. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 5, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
he said describing the fantasy novel he was reading as they walked the drizzled streets she was listening & laughing & realized she’d been walking through one city or another next to this man for more than twenty years longer of course than their kids were old their smart alecky sons who hadn’t yet met the person with whom they might walk through rain discussing ridiculous books with great sincerity & pleasure Seriously he said I can’t stop reading it but when they went upstairs to the good bed in the good hotel he did stop reading & found a place where her shoulder met her neck & touched it until her mind finally went away for a while & they became bedraggled & he went out like a light but not even the good bed at the good hotel after good sex could put her to sleep not the meditation app or the long online essay about the White Supremacy of Conceptual Poetry she missed her dead mother & her middle-aged cousin who’d died the summer before she wondered if miles away her youngest was whimpering was her oldest awake texting was her middle son worrying she wanted the husband to tell her the plot again but didn’t want to wake him he lay over the covers on his back his breath audible & regular folded hands rising & falling peaceful & fearless as if she’d never once meant him harm as if she’d always loved this warm animal as if this were not the same summer she’d said If that’s really how you feel this isn’t going to last & he hadn’t said anything anger sadness doubt & disappointment was a wave that slapped them down & under so many people had died & life felt shorter than how long they’d been together they had through so many omissions & commissions hurt & been hurt it was that same summer but she was alive & awake he was asleep & alive they were weak but still there
Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Zucker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 4, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Two weeks after 17 students were gunned down in Parkland, Fla., hundreds of worshippers clutching AR-15s slurped holy wine and exchanged or renewed wedding vows in a commitment ceremony at the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary in Newfoundland, Pa.
Draped in thick silk the hue of hemorrhage and bone, you fondle
your butt stocks, muffled lust needles your cheeks. Your aim? To
make America great. Again,
your terse-lipped Lord has nudged you into the glare—numbed
and witless in His name, you preen and re-glue blessed unions,
mistake America straight, contend
your unloosed crave for the sugared heat of triggers. Besotted beneath
your crowns of unspent shells, you hard-rhyme vows and
quake, aware of that weight again,
the gawky, feral gush of fetish. Every uncocked groom and rigid
bride is greased and un-tongued, struck dumb by what’s at
stake. A miracle waits. You men
and women kaboom your hearts with skewered Spam and searing
pink Walmart wine, graze idly on ammo and blood-frosted
cake. A prayer is the bait. Amen
woos guests in their ball gowns and bird suits, hallows your blind
obsession with your incendiary intended. Though you’ve
faked America, hate upends
all this odd holy—its frayed altars, fumbled psalms, assault rifles
chic in itty veils. And we marvel at this
outbreak, bewaring that gate again,
left unlatched so this bright foolish can flow through. This ilk
of stupid blares blue enough to rouse ancestors—y’all ’bout to
make Amiri berate again,
’bout to conjure Fannie Lou and her tree-trunk wrists. While you
snot-weep, caress mute carbines, wed your unfathomable
ache, America waits. ’Cause when
the sacrament cools, and the moon is pocked with giggling, who’ll
fall naked first, whose shuddering tongue will dare the barrel?
Take that dare. Consummate. And then,
whose blood will that be?
Copyright © 2018 by Patricia Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 30, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
See how she lists. The body is bent as light, as wind will it. And so you must tread light. Mind the rocks under foot. You must tread slow. There has been drought; see where water has long ago troughed, has carved her. See how she branches, twisting, her many hands reaching. Her roots also reach, sweetened from reaching. When fire arrives, she toughens. She will slough away the thick. She will be slick, and dark beneath the rough. She will mimic the fire her bones remember. Know her bones glisten. See how she rests. The body will fall, as time wills it. See how it hollows, how her pieces return to earth. And from her thick trunk, mushrooms cluster— Her belly a nest of moss and poison. When broken open, see what of her mother she has kept, what of her father, what of the stars.
Copyright © 2018 by Barbara Jane Reyes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 29, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
The average mother loses 700 hours of sleep in the first year of her child’s life; or, what that first year taught me about America.
Most of us favor one side when we walk. As we tire,
we lean into that side and stop moving in a straight line—
so it takes longer to get anywhere,
let alone home.
In wilderness conditions,
where people don’t know the terrain,
a tired person might end up leaning so far into one side
they’ll walk in a circle rather than straight ahead.
It can kill you, such leaning
—and it can get you killed.
Rest helps.
I told my husband,
I walked in a circle in my mind but you came out okay.
Initially, he asked me to clarify,
but then he let it go.
Who wrote that first If You Lived Here You’d Be Home by Now sign?
It seems I’m going to have to move.
I am tired and also sick
of helping other people in lieu of helping myself.
Rest now.
It's really not that bad: we’re in the home stretch.
That’s the mind of a parent.
Relentless optimism in the face of sheer panic
and exhaustion.
Copyright © 2018 by Camille T. Dungy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 28, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged
I know I know the kingdom is not fair
but it’s what I have a montage of red and a mitosis
of knuckles I’m not sure how you could expect me
to love anything Ain’t no question
sadness is regal like that
golden and replaceable once I wanted
a lineage of identical men once a mouth soft and hot
as the quickest way that gold can hurt you You see
a pattern yet? I practice the want of nothing and fail
I’ve been shown how ugly I can be
when I am invisible
I don’t believe in yesterdays
The throat of loneliness? Straddled with my knife
I press my hands to my face and the lament is a valley
the light sags through What do you do when you have
lost Everything? Rewrite the history of Everything
I don’t like my smile because someone told me I didn’t like it
Now I am gorgeous in all the languages I mothered
Flex the antonym of Missing I avenge myself
Stretch my hands I orphan my grief for the living and it is beauty
ain’t no question I monarch
the lonely I my own everything now I miss my love and
it is an American grief I strike the smell from nostalgia
cut my memory to spite my country What is the odor of nothing
but my dominion in want of excess I grin and pillars of bone flower
into sawed-off crowns say I flex the light and the light flexes
heat shimmer unfurling like a bicep my lust a mirage
where the body is merely a congealing of the river I can feel it
slowly drifting away from me The world I knew is gone
and getting more gone and my anthem populating my nose
with an abundance of salt I slip the shroud over the life I named
and forget I belonged to someone once My soverign's face is a riot
of diamonds whining This will be a beautiful death and I am free
and gorgeous and desperate to never have to miss anyone again
I rock the jeweled shroud become the bride of my own sad light
Copyright © 2018 by Julian Randall. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 3, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.