The newborn fell asleep beside her mother who died in the early morning from a blood clot in her brain.
Quiet and lovely, Beth’s death was a loss for millions of little girls.
Their bodies were found five miles apart in the kitchens of their homes.
The boy’s mother died on a kidney machine. He died at nineteen from a virus.
He drank too much one night and then died from an overdose.
He was shot in the back. The other was stabbed and slashed repeatedly.
He passed through the door of the hotel with a little pistol in his pocket.
Both were bachelors. Both lived alone. Both were discovered at 8 a.m.
The deadly fire they started in the rafters spread to his crib.
My feathers ruffle. There’s no record of his death, but he died.
Things get better, get worse and then your body is cold and stiff on a table in the mortician’s room.
Your feet, once tucked into your mother’s body, warm and slippery, are
now hidden inside a box.
“Closure and Closure” was first printed in The Paris Review, Issue 143 (Summer 1997). Included in Detective Sentences (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2001) by Barbara Henning © 2001; Prompt Book: Experiments for Writing Poetry and Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2021) by Barbara Henning © 1997.
I dreamt a dream! What can it mean? And that I was a maiden Queen Guarded by an Angel mild: Witless woe was ne’er beguiled! And I wept both night and day, And he wiped my tears away; And I wept both day and night, And hid from him my heart’s delight. So he took his wings, and fled; Then the morn blushed rosy red. I dried my tears, and armed my fears With ten thousand shields and spears. Soon my Angel came again; I was armed, he came in vain; For the time of youth was fled, And grey hairs were on my head.
This poem is in the public domain.
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live no more we may live ever.
This poem is in the public domain.
Yet the peach tree
still rises
& falls with fruit & without
birds eat it the sparrows fight
our desert
burns with trash & drug
it also breathes & sprouts
vines & maguey
laws pass laws with scientific walls
detention cells husband
with the son
the wife &
the daughter who
married a citizen
they stay behind broken slashed
un-powdered in the apartment to
deal out the day
& the puzzles
another law then another
Mexican
Indian
spirit exile
migration sky
the grass is mowed then blown
by a machine sidewalks are empty
clean & the Red Shouldered Hawk
peers
down — from
an abandoned wooden dome
an empty field
it is all in-between the light
every day this changes a little
yesterday homeless &
w/o papers Alberto
left for Denver a Greyhound bus he said
where they don’t check you
walking working
under the silver darkness
walking working
with our mind
our life
Copyright © by Juan Felipe Herrera. Used with the permission of the author.
Gauzy film between
evergreens is a web
of loss. Get closer. Reach
to touch the shimmering
gossamer and your finger
pushes through. Remember
filling that space with desire?
Someone else might grieve
the spider who abandoned
this home; others grow anxious
waiting for a deer’s walk
to wreck it. But you—
you grieve the net of thought
spun inside your own womb:
intricate and glossy and strong.
Copyright © 2024 by Christine Stewart-Nuñez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 14, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
I never feel so alive as when I am
writing and have no right
answer for what this means
for the lives of others, how
to live in the after which after
all means the now of our living
together when together
means death for all
those forbidden from
entering the home so
methodically built until after
they are dead. Only
after will locked doors
swing amply open to
admit the murdered
into rooms of vast
crushed comfort, whose
inhabitants eat and sleep
on furnishings carved
with corpses, stepping
with hospitable sorrow
around the bodies of the
dead, speaking dirges
into the phantom
darkness. What happens
in the quiet grave where
the living make themselves
at home, where noisily
they intend to thrive, where
the poem itself concedes
to suffering so it might persist
in blazing against it.
Copyright © 2025 by Youna Kwak. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 5, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
From Collected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, published by Harper & Brothers Publishers. Copyright © 1956 by Norma Millay Ellis.
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
This poem is in the public domain.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
This poem is in the public domain.
Sometimes I think that people are the fingers
of God, like the blind ocean touching land,
and life’s a Braille that I won’t understand
if I’m not touching you and we’re not singers
kissing a song out of our mouths in bed.
Tonight I fumble keys in darkness by
my door and try to feel my way inside
to cook alone and watch TV; instead
I walk down California to the seething
blackness out there beyond the glowing beach
and stand a long time listening to each
heave, the ocean like the planet breathing.
It’s done with raging windily and wild.
Tonight it whispers, Shush, it whispers, Child.
From Beast in the Apartment (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014) by Tony Barnstone. Copyright © 2014 by Tony Barnstone. Used with the permission of the poet.
The middle of a kiss, and though he opened
up wide and wider, her own small jawbones gave
a little crack and stuck, and look what happened:
as if she’d fallen in an open grave,
he swallowed her at last, and then she wandered
in a dark saturated country where
the red land throbbed with capillaries under
electric stars. A kiss had brought her there,
a simple kiss that rained and filled her head
with blood, a nightmare kiss, a wrong man kiss;
why had she kissed a man with such a mouth,
with such thick teeth and jaws, such tongue, instead
of kissing someone who would let her out,
kissing someone nicer, who ate less.
From Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005) by Tony Barnstone. Copyright © 2005 by Tony Barnstone. Used with the permission of the author.
Not an act, I’m told, more a leave to live
where words have no leverage—I’ve a pile
of words. It was useful to hear actors
talk shop about how one doesn’t just act
but live the role—a trick into feeling
what doesn’t need said. I watch a cast now
from this seat next to no one asking me
what was said like these two do, one row up.
Once home, they’ll unwrap each other’s bow-tied
necks; mouths agape, marvel over their spoils
as if for the first time. Look at the way
one lowers the other’s mask, levies a kiss,
then worries back its curl over the usher
-hushed laugh, each needling the other to live.
Copyright © 2023 by Tommye Blount. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 15, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
The moon assumes her voyeuristic perch
to find the rut of me, releashed from sense,
devoid of focus ’cept by your design.
I never thought restraint would be my thing.
Then you: the hole from which my logic seeps,
who bucks my mind’s incessant swallowsong
& pins the speaker’s squirming lyric down
with ease. You coax a measured flood, decide
the scatter of my breath & know your place—
astride the August heat, your knuckles tight
around a bratty vers, a fuschia gag:
you quiet my neurotic ass, can still
the loudness murmuring beneath my skull.
Be done. There’s nothing more to say.
Copyright © 2023 by Imani Davis. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 3, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
I know why I fell hard for Hecuba—
shins skinned and lips split to blooming lupine
on her throat’s rough coat, hurled down the whole length
of disaster—I’m sure I’d grown to know
by then to slacken as a sail against
the current and squall of a woman’s woe.
What could I do but chorus my ruddered
howl to hers? When you’re a brown girl raised up
near the river, there’s always a woman
bereft and bank-wrecked, bloodied and bleating
her insistent lament. Ay Llorona—
every crossing is a tomb and a tune,
a wolf-wail and the moon that turns me to
scratch at the tracks of every mud-dirged girl.
Copyright © 2019 by Deborah Paredez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 4, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.
The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.
Oh, if instead she’d left to me
The thing she took into the grave!—
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “The courage that my mother had” from Collected Poems. Copyright 1954, © 1982 by Norma Millay Ellis. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, www.millay.org.
Thine eyes I love, and they, as pitying me,
Knowing thy heart torments me with disdain,
Have put on black and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.
And truly not the morning sun of heaven
Better becomes the grey cheeks of the east,
Nor that full star that ushers in the even
Doth half that glory to the sober west,
As those two mourning eyes become thy face:
O, let it then as well beseem thy heart
To mourn for me, since mourning doth thee grace,
And suit thy pity like in every part.
Then will I swear beauty herself is black
And all they foul that thy complexion lack.
This poem is in the public domain.
Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold, and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is take the worst to be.
If eyes corrupt by over-partial looks
Be anchor’d in the bay where all men ride,
Why of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forged hooks,
Whereto the judgement of my heart is tied?
Why should my heart think that a several plot
Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place?
Or mine eyes seeing this, say this is not,
To put fair truth upon so foul a face?
In things right true my heart and eyes have err’d,
And to this false plague are they now transferr’d.
This poem is in the public domain.
Am I failing? For no longer can I cast A glory round about this head of gold. Glory she wears, but springing from the mould; Not like the consecration of the Past! Is my soul beggared? Something more than earth I cry for still: I cannot be at peace In having Love upon a mortal lease. I cannot take the woman at her worth! Where is the ancient wealth wherewith I clothed Our human nakedness, and could endow With spiritual splendour a white brow That else had grinned at me the fact I loathed? A kiss is but a kiss now! and no wave Of a great flood that whirls me to the sea. But, as you will! we’ll sit contentedly, And eat our pot of honey on the grave.
This poem is in the public domain.
Though the people on the internet help too.
They send money by pressing a small button
on their screens. It would be disingenuous
to claim all the credit—we can’t heal
or hurt alone. I sniff the tops of the rose heads
like a newborn’s scalp—fresh skin and hair
only a few days picked. I try to arrange the flowers
on my bed, create a romantic scene
like all the 90s rom-coms I still watch. I’m stuck
in the past, I know. I’m stuck in the present,
I know that too. I thought the roses
could be a cure, and maybe in a small way
they were, each petal I plucked so gently
from the stems gave in to me.
Copyright © 2022 by Diannely Antigua. This poem appeared in Waxwing Literary Journal, Fall 2022. Used with permission of the author.