After she died, I’d catch her
stuffing my nose with pine needles and oak,
staring off into the shadows of early morning.
Me, too jetlagged for the smells a ghost leaves behind.
The tailor of histories,
my mother sewed our Black Barbies and Kens
Nigerian clothes, her mind so tight against
the stitching, that in precision, she looked mean
as hell, too. My mother’s laugh was a record skipping,
so deep she left nicks in the vinyl.
See? Even in death, she wants to be fable.
I don’t know what fathers teach sons,
but I am moving my mother
to a land where grief is no longer
gruesome. She loved top 40, yacht rock,
driving in daylight with the wind
wa-wa-ing through her cracked window
like Allah blowing breath
over the open bottle neck of our living.
She knew ninety-nine names for God,
and yet how do I remember her—
as what no god could make?
Copyright © 2023 by Hafizah Augustus Geter. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 18, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don’t mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don’t sing all the time The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn’t half so bad if it isn’t you Oh the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t much mind a few dead minds in the higher places or a bomb or two now and then in your upturned faces or such other improprieties as our Name Brand society is prey to with its men of distinction and its men of extinction and its priests and other patrolmen and its various segregations and congressional investigations and other constipations that our fool flesh is heir to Yes the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and making the love scene and making the sad scene and singing low songs of having inspirations and walking around looking at everything and smelling flowers and goosing statues and even thinking and kissing people and making babies and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing and going swimming in rivers on picnics in the middle of the summer and just generally ‘living it up’ Yes but then right in the middle of it comes the smiling mortician
From A Coney Island of the Mind, copyright © 1955 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
eenie meenie minie moe
catch a voter by her toe
if she hollers then you know
got yourself a real jane crow
* * *
one vote is an opinion
with a quiet legal force ::
a barely audible beep
in the local traffic, & just
a plashless drop of mercury
in the national thermometer.
but a collectivity of votes
/a flock of votes, a pride of votes,
a murder of votes/ can really
make some noise.
* * *
one vote begets another
if you make a habit of it.
my mother started taking me
to the polls with her when i
was seven :: small, thrilled
to step in the booth, pull
the drab curtain hush-shut
behind us, & flip the levers
beside each name she pointed
to, the Xs clicking into view.
there, she called the shots.
* * *
rich gal, poor gal
hired girl, thief
teacher, journalist
vote your grief
* * *
one vote’s as good as another
:: still, in 1913, illinois’s gentle
suffragists, hearing southern
women would resent spotting
mrs. ida b. wells-barnett amidst
whites marchers, gently kicked
their sister to the curb. but when
the march kicked off, ida got
right into formation, as planned.
the tribune’s photo showed
her present & accounted for.
* * *
one vote can be hard to keep
an eye on :: but several /a
colony of votes/ can’t scuttle
away unnoticed so easily. my
mother, veteran registrar for
our majority black election
district, once found—after
much searching—two bags
of ballots /a litter of votes/
stuffed in a janitorial closet.
* * *
one-mississippi
two-mississippis
* * *
one vote was all fannie lou
hamer wanted. in 1962, when
her constitutional right was
over forty years old, she tried
to register. all she got for her
trouble was literacy tested, poll
taxed, fired, evicted, & shot
at. a year of grassroots activism
nearly planted her mississippi
freedom democratic party
in the national convention.
* * *
one vote per eligible voter
was all stacey abrams needed.
she nearly won the georgia
governor’s race in 2018 :: lost by
50,000 /an unkindness of votes/
to the man whose job was purg
maintaining the voter rolls.
days later, she rolled out plans
for getting voters a fair fight.
it’s been two years—& counting.
Copyright © 2020 Evie Shockley. This poem was co-commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and the New York Philharmonic as part of the Project 19 initiative, and appeared in the Spring-Summer 2020 issue of American Poets.
One of their picture books would no doubt show The two lost children wandering in a maze Of anthropomorphic tree limbs: the familiar crow Swoops down upon the trail they leave of corn, Tolerant of the error of their ways. Hand in hand they stumble onto the story, Brighteyed with beginnings of fever, scared Half to death, yet never for a moment Doubting the outcome that had been prepared Long in advance: Girl saves brother from oven, Appalling witch dies in appropriate torment; Her hoarded treasure buys them their parents' love. * * * "As happy an ending as any fable Can provide," squawks the crow, who had expected more: Delicate morsels from the witch's table. It's an old story—in the modern version The random children fall to random terror. You see it nightly on the television: Cameras focus on the lopeared bear Beside the plastic ukulele, shattered In a fit of rage—the lost children are Found in the first place we now think to look: Under the fallen leaves, under the scattered Pages of a lost children's picture book. * * * But if we leave terror waiting in the rain For the wrong bus, or if we have terror find, At the very last moment the right train, Only to get off at the wrong station— If we for once imagine a happy ending, Which is, as always, a continuation, It's because the happy ending's a necessity, It isn't just a sentimental ploy" Without the happy ending there would be No one to tell the story to but the witch, And the story is clearly meant for the girl and boy Just now about to step into her kitchen.
From Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems by Charles Martin. Copyright © 2002 by Charles Martin. Reprinted with the permission of The Overlook Press.
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
From And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou. Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used with permission.
—after Remedios Varo’s Mujer saliendo del psicoanalista
another face has sprouted in my chest
beastly, that’s me, a super freak
cavorting with your skull in my grasp
displaced personalities cannot be cloaked
ever, they will grow like a haunted
fever of wispy hair
gathered in a basket, along with time, a
half-filled vial of poison &
illusions of tick-tock-clocking syringe
just let me explain:
killing myself is not an option
let me try to live with my
multiple personas and their infinite masks, why
not weave them into a poncho
of chartreuse green, grow them,
pouch them, wear them like horns
question my memories, befriend
radical thoughts and nightmares
solemn my specters behind
tenuous doors with intimidating bells
understand the unexplainable, develop
venom as Tilda Swinton couture
when dreams become a snail shell planted
X, marks the spot of this treasure I shall reveal,
yell on a mountain, YES, this is mine, I will
zap my fears—I can face all the faces, darling, of course I can
Copyright © 2025 by Grisel Y. Acosta. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 8, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
I just did
wat I talked about doing
wen we wuz visiting
on da smartphone.
You told me
wat you wuz eating
foa breakfast da adah day
and it kinnah inspired me.
Da last time
I ate French Toast
wuz wen I wuz living
in Hawaiʻi years ago.
So I wen actually
make some dis morning
and I topped
da tasty slices off
wit some kinamona
and some Ohio maple syrup.
I’m eating right now
while I’m tinking
about you
and looking at wun picture
of our parents
on my living room tabletop.
It’s just like
I’m in da yellow kitchen
up in Wahiawa Heights
at da old house.
Da hoʻomanaʻo is ʻono.
Da French Toast
is pretty good too.
Copyright © 2022 by Joe Balaz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 2, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.