You named me for light. How we belong
in the little spaces carved for us, love
tucking us into a walnut shell hollow
where you’d take the tiniest brush and paint
a Christmas star along the concavity—
Some days I’m a pendulum that exists on a planet
that periodically loses gravity. Some days
my light is spent, the light-years required
to travel back to myself too many.
Since you died I take tiny, redundant steps,
and, a, an. Articles on which I predicate
my survival.
I want to believe death is only a pause
in our continuous language. Stillness,
but what it means is cosmic change, that you and I
and the delicate spaces we drew into being
between us constitute a light source
that spears endlessly through a cloud-break
as hope lances inside
spherical borders.
From The Blue Mimes by Sara Daniele Rivera. Copyright © 2024 by Sara Daniele Rivera. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.
Allah, you gave us a language
where yesterday & tomorrow
are the same word. Kal.
A spell cast with the entire
mouth. Back of the throat
to teeth. Tomorrow means I might
have her forever. Yesterday means
I say goodbye, again.
Kal means they are the same.
I know you can bend time.
I am merely asking for what
is mine. Give me my mother for no
other reason than I deserve her.
If yesterday & tomorrow are the same
pluck the flower of my mother’s body
from the soil. Kal means I’m in the crib,
eyelashes wet as she looks over me.
Kal means I’m on the bed,
crawling away from her, my father
back from work. Kal means she’s
dancing at my wedding not-yet come.
Kal means she’s oiling my hair
before the first day of school. Kal
means I wake to her strange voice
in the kitchen. Kal means
she’s holding my unborn baby
in her arms, helping me pick a name.
From If They Come For Us: Poems (One World/ Random House, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Fatimah Asghar. Used with the permission of the poet.
What is a wound but a flower dying on its descent to the earth, bag of scent filled with war, forest, torches, some trouble that befell now over and done. A wound is a fire sinking into itself. The tinder serves only so long, the log holds on and still it gives up, collapses into its bed of ashes and sand. I burned my hand cooking over a low flame, that flame now alive under my skin, the smell not unpleasant, the wound beautiful as a full-blown peony. Say goodbye to disaster. Shake hands with the unknown, what becomes of us once we’ve been torn apart and returned to our future, naked and small, sewn back together scar by scar.
Copyright © 2018 by Dorianne Laux. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 17, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.