called you from your idle
dream-workshop with the subtle spanners,
half-speeches, after keeping
you up late as my youth last night, later
than the gods’ twilight, who witnessed your trials
at fixing kinks in my causal body, just before sleep.
(Though I guess now that gods do sleep, I don’t know where.)
I watched a star burn through your wall-length windows
—no sun of ours, we were long past
midnight—resplendent fire raging far more
distant, more dead. Pur ti miro, you showed me,
Pur ti stringo, pur ti godo. I felt closer than
ever to inspiration—each breath into passive lungs—
while your fingers pressed behind my neck.
Pur t’annodo: I enchain you, I tie you down.
You left me asleep on the couch, and I thought by
dawn I’d sneak in beside your soul. But
a blessed light came disrupting the blind-
fold and blinds, and instead I woke you with Wagner.
Copyright © 2025 by Logan February. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 17, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
On the fringes of conversations
surging around me in a different language,
my tongue is frozen in English.
Silence funnels into my body
I reach for words I recognize—
‘kitap’ book, ‘café,’ brand names.
I nod and smile trying not to look demure,
use abhinaya, throw open the nine gates of emotion,
let wonder, worry, fear, ire, envy, disgust,
piety, surprise, and love cavort on my face,
my hands aiding me, a language refugee,
roaming bazaars and sun-weathered ruins.
“Thank you,” I say to the waiter, touching my heart
as he places aromatic coffee on the table.
Beyond the courtyard, the peach dome of a mosque.
I expect the muezzin to sing at noon,
remember Haji Ali dargah, a moon on the bay
on my bus rides home from college.
In Kolkata when I was 9, I’d played silently,
my ear tuned to my classmates chattering in Bengali,
drinking their words until they became mine.
Copyright © 2025 by Pramila Venkateswaran. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 24, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
Zion says, “The LORD has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.” Can a
woman forget her baby, or disown the child of her womb? Though she might
forget, I never could forget you.—Isaiah 49:14–15“What It’s Like to Lose Your Entire Memory.”—Cosmopolitan
You don’t remember anything.
How I formed you in your mother’s womb;
nursed you; bathed you; taught you to talk;
led you to springs of water?
I sang your name before you were born.
I’m singing your name now.
You’re clueless as an infant.
When I tell you to shout for joy,
you hear a bicycle, or a cat.
Sometimes, memories of me come back
like children you forgot you had:
a garden; a bride; an image of your mother,
a best friend, a brother, or a cop, or snow, or afternoon.
Whose are these? you wonder.
Then you forget, and feel forgotten,
like an infant who falls asleep
at the breast
and wakes up hungry again.
Your mother might forget you, child,
but I never forget.
Your name is engraved
on the palms of my hands.
I shower you with examples of my love—
bees and birds, librarians and life skills,
emotions, sunlight, compassion.
Nothing connects.
Every dawn, every generation,
I have to teach you again:
this is water; this is darkness;
this is a body
fitting your description;
that’s a crush;
this is an allergic reaction.
This is your anger.
This is mine.
This is me
reminding you to eat.
Turn off the stove.
Take your medication.
This is the realization
that I am yours and you are mine. This is you
forgetting.
Copyright © 2025 by Joy Ladin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 25, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
At the end
of the story,
we exchanged
hair. Two tiny
Ziploc bags,
little plastic
windows.
I sheared off
the tip
of my braid,
candlewick
twist-tight.
Please
use these
dead cells
to make
new words.
We never
baked
the blueberry
crumble:
let the
mashed bowl
of indigo
fruit
on the
counter
be your ink.
Dip me
whole
into the
sweet
blood &
try to
write
about
cutting
hair &
a scissor’s
song,
its sound
akin to
a memory
holding its
own
breath.
I wear
your black
cursive
on my chin,
& imagine
being the
teenaged boy
that you will
raise
with a lover
that looks
like me.
I wrap
you around
my wedding
finger, pull
& watch
you snap back
until you yawn.
I dress
you in the
foam of
apricot shampoo,
spin you in
my palm
to wash out
time.
At midnight,
you lay me
at the nape
of your neck,
guarding
your spine,
in the blue violet
of dream’s
intermissions.
We are
climbing
strands
to each other’s
roots,
searching
for homes
that we
have
already
passed.
Behind
your head
& in my hands,
we are closer
than secret.
Copyright © 2025 by Yalie Saweda Kamara. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 23, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
my girlfriend drives us south. There’s a smear
of hot pink on the asphalt. From the passenger’s seat
I twist my head back. Did you see that? Only a flash,
until a few miles later. Again, then again, then a whole
velvet deer burst on the shoulder, and now everything is pink.
She stares ahead and holds my hand. She has asked
me not to notice these things, but I am a glutton
for how quickly the body becomes something different.
Before we met, I imagined a wedding like this. But—
not this. She stood with the other bridesmaids in champagne.
I followed their husbands, snuck away for hot wings with them
between the ceremony and reception. It was so strange.
The bride was so beautiful. Her family, so kind. The chicken?
The most delicious I have ever eaten, and that made it all
worse, as I jostled with the husbands over the succulent drumsticks,
startled by the unexpected ease of flesh sundered from bone.
Now, there’s a light rain. She stares ahead. The grey, the pink,
her hand—will we always unknow each other in this way?
I want the whole carcass. I want to roam the caverns of her body,
loving her like an animal howling its own name.
Copyright © 2025 by Anja Mei-Ping Kuipers. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 27, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
It was summer when I found you
In the meadow long ago,
And the golden vetch was growing
By the shore.
Did we falter when love took us
With a gust of great desire?
Does the barely bid the wind wait
In his course?
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 29, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
The sun holds all the earth and all the sky
From the gold throne of this midsummer day.
In the soft air the shadow of a sigh
Breathes on the leaves and scarcely makes them sway.
The wood lies silent in the shimmering heat,
Save where the insects make a lazy drone,
And ever and anon from some tree near,
A dove’s enamoured moan,
Or distant rook’s faint cawing harsh and sweet,
Comes dimly floating to my listening ear.
Right in the wood’s deep heart I lay me down,
And look up at the sky between the leaves,
Through delicate lace I see her deep blue gown.
Across a fern a scarlet spider weaves
From branch to branch a slender silver thread,
And hangs there shining in the white sunbeams,
A ruby tremulous on a streak of light.
And high above my head
One spray of honeysuckle sweats and dreams,
With one wild honey-bee for acolyte.
My nest is all untrod and virginal,
And virginal the path that led me here,
For all along the grass grew straight and tall,
And live things rustled in the thicket near:
And briar rose stretched out to sweet briar rose
Wild slender arms, and barred the way to me
With many a flowering arch, rose-pink or white,
As bending carefully.
Leaving unbroken all their blossoming bows,
I passed along, a reverent neophyte.
The air is full of soft imaginings,
They float unseen beneath the hot sunbeams,
Like tired moths on heavy velvet wings.
They droop above my drowsy head like dreams.
The hum of bees, the murmuring of doves.
The soft faint whispering of unnumbered trees.
Mingle with unreal things, and low and deep
From visionary groves,
Imagined lutes make voiceless harmonies.
And false flutes sigh before the gates of sleep.
O rare sweet hour! O cup of golden wine!
The night of these my days is dull and dense,
And stars are few, be this the anodyne!
Of many woes the perfect recompense.
I thought that I had lost for evermore
The sense of this ethereal drunkenness,
This fierce desire to live, to breathe, to be;
But even now, no less
Than in the merry noon that danced before
My tedious night, I taste its ecstasy.
Taste, and remember all the summer days
That lie, like golden reflections in the lake
Of vanished years, unreal but sweet always;
Soft luminous shadows that I may not take
Into my hands again, but still discern
Drifting like gilded ghosts before my eyes.
Beneath the waters of forgotten things.
Sweet with faint memories,
And mellow with old loves that used to burn
Dead summer days ago, like fierce red kings.
And this hour too must die, even now the sun
Droops to the sea, and with untroubled feet
The quiet evening comes: the day is done.
The air that throbbed beneath the passionate heat
Grows calm and cool and virginal again.
The colour fades and sinks to sombre tones.
As when in youthful cheeks a blush grows dim.
Hushed are the monotones
Of doves and bees, and the long flowery lane
Rustles beneath the wind in playful whim.
Gone are the passion and the pulse that beat
With fevered strokes, and gone the unseen things
That clothed the hour with shining raiment meet
To deck enchantments and imaginings.
No joy is here but only neutral peace
And loveless languor and indifference,
And faint remembrance of lost ecstasy.
The darkening shades increase.
My dreams go out like tapers—I must hence.
Far off I hear Night calling to the sea.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 28, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.