For Valentine
my girl positioned for a twerk session-
knees bent, hands below the thigh, tongue out, head
turned to look at her body’s precession.
she in tune. breath in. breasts hang. hips freshen.
she slow-wine. pulse waistline to a beat bled
for her, un-guilt the knees for the session.
fair saint of vertebrae- backbone blessing,
her pop- in innate. her pop- out self- bred,
head locked into her holied procession.
dance is proof she loves herself, no questions-
no music required, no crowd needed.
she arched into a gateway, protecting-
this dance is proof she loves me, no guessing.
a bronx bedroom, we hip-to-hip threaded.
she turn to me, tranced by her possessin’.
she coils herself to, calls forth a legend-
round bodied booty, bounce a praise ballad.
she break hold, turn whole in a twerk session.
body charmed, spell-bent, toward progressing.
From i shimmer sometimes, too (Button Poetry, 2019) Copyright © 2019 by Porsha Olayiwola. Used with permission of the author.
Hushed whispers in an undisclosed room
Take it out of the girl
a child, boyish in nature their smallness magnified.
Outcasted—the soft bodied animal you are
determined unruly animalia,
what survives inflation & inertia?
The body is a set of complex feedback systems
nothing is as it appears
the coexistence of a beard & breasts
evidence of the body’s willfully defiant nature
The body’s resilience amid the promise of perish:
somehow the child survives their own hand
the day’s weary edge inverted toward grace
A child, boyish in their nature & barrel shaped
survives sedimented against the residue
of dunes, soil, leaf litter, & the bodies of a lesser
What couldn’t be excised
your boyish nature
your untamed phylum, your small heart pulsing loud
notes against the night.
Copyright © 2020 by Jari Bradley. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 8, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
In the house that is my body
a Black girl waves at the world
from her window. She can be
safe here because the house
is cis assumed. I want to keep us
& keep us safe, even if it means
I am cis assumed. My phantom
breasts that aren’t phantom breasts
but A-cups. I get so sick of them
not seeing the girl. I get so scared
they might see the girl. Safe
derives from the Old French sauf
meaning protected, watched-
over, assured of salvation.
I am the watchtower for the girls
& their salvation. Let’s hear it for
the girls. About the invention of Black
femmes, is this what Spillers meant?
Am I? In the watchtower that is my body,
there is a door that leads to a legion
of ungone femmes. It’s safe inside
the girl for the others to stay.
Copyright © 2021 by Jada Renée Allen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 12, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
& just the vermillion
flicker of cannas near the pane.
Our bodies too, plateaued;
my hole, newly bloomless.
Outdoors, further out, a wren
winnows, the mesquite
on whose yielding limbs the all-
but-tender fowl rests
flexes, in cold as in darkness . . .
Time, like desire, expands too—
no? My lover, nodding gently,
shakes the leaves, &
A little softer. A little softer now—
A little softer, for what’s been torn.
Copyright © 2022 by Jada Renée Allen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 17, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
All I ever wanted to be was a song—
something soft and light held in the mouth
sung sweet beneath the coming dawn.
I return to that first desire—its gingham blouse
rubbed against the heavy pull of flesh hovered
in a dark that I can only recall as that dark.
I ask what grace awaits that tender tendril’s suffered
stretch of green wide enough to tear a stark
light out from under a troubled sky? I return
to the center of that smallness and sing its wounds—
jagged rasp crooned until edged out and earned.
I was the only boi I knew dreaming in soft bruise.
And it made me as beautiful as the blood’s slow sprawl
at my knee, right before punching a bullying boy to crawl.
Copyright © 2023 by Jari Bradley. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 22, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
sun beats
wind leaps
blood memory
apocalyptic self-image crystallized affections of pious solace
emptiness from this ceaseless war
I want to sin
against purity
bliss hovering above the void
haptic fallout feverish blood
sun beats down
wind leaps
blood memory
cheerful obscene boredom
angel
of
the
sun
singing with a hard fist
life’s benevolent corruption
everything is hard against the tongue
everything dissolving
into otherworldly paradise
make heaven my home
I never learn my lesson
Copyright © 2021 by Precious Okoyomon. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 29, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
I was on a walk when I was struck by the precarity of the gender that wore me,
which moved my matter, wrote books, and fell in love. as a child, I scoured
the forest for brittle cicada skins abandoned on trees. husks present differently now
a pair of nylons caught in the thicket, a beak surviving its decomposing bird,
a mural of George Floyd with a purple cock spray-painted on his beryl cheek.
among these discreet mutilations, I pull a line of thought through flesh
where a misled margin slept. I was uninhabitable before I snared a man
for his hide. I was not unlike the skin of a drum thriving under a stamina
that made music of me before I split. you wouldn’t recognize me now
if you saw me in the trees, played out, scattered to the undergrowth. I took a life
and returned it to scale and membrane. I foraged a life coated in plastic
and mud from the highway overpass. it reeked of wheatpiss and it was mine.
Copyright © 2022 by Xan Phillips. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 14, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
by HAUNTIE
Body
A meeting place between the many times that came before it
These times, the trajectories that brought me to be here now
Body
A passing form
like a flower
the slowest moment of rupture in a single time
in time—body as memory
through time—body as home
with time—body as matter
i am body, yet i do not claim body
i never meant to sever with ink
What is the act of mark making, if not to define?
And what is definition, if not without exclusion?
What is exclusion, if not the cutting of matter?
The abstraction of cartography occurs
when the difference of parts is blurred
and lines are no longer visible
and place is not but visceral.
From To Whitey & the Cracker Jack (Anhinga Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by May Yang. Reprinted by permission of Anhinga Press.