I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs
and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead
on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow
feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.
I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot
feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls
skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.
To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white
petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am
in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.
Copyright © 2017 by Donika Kelly. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 20, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.
Nothing today hasn’t happened before:
I woke alone, bundled the old dog
into his early winter coat, watered him,
fed him, left him to his cage for the day
closing just now. My eye drifts
to the buff belly of a hawk wheeling,
as they do, in a late fall light that melts
against the turning oak and smelts
its leaves bronze.
Before you left,
I bent to my task, fixed in my mind
the slopes and planes of your face;
fitted, in some essential geography,
your belly’s stretch and collapse
against my own, your scent familiar
as a thousand evenings.
Another time,
I might have dismissed as hunger
this cataloguing, this fitting, this fixing,
but today I crest the hill, secure in the company
of my longing. What binds us, stretches:
a tautness I’ve missed as a sapling,
supple, misses the wind.
Copyright © 2023 by Donika Kelly. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 10, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
Was it odd to be born?
Was it odd to be born
when women wore rick-rack
& the sun was a bracelet of yes?
When wind bent dandelions in puffy winglets,
& wisdom did raise her voice & not say weed &
when the toad did raise its spikes at the same time
as federal codes
& the try-to-be-perfect raised its voice?
Did the clang of copper collectors & the too-many lawns
begin in Arizona
while peel-paint steeples rose over dirt for the prism
of progress,
minerals torn from mines with no mouths
but you had a mouth & sang early?
When nuclear testing began north of love
& the Remington computer was placed in office use,
when there was just as much beauty & sex as later,
while some lay down at drive-ins in Chevies on seats
the color of crushed
berries & phone calls went up to a dime?
When Congress loaned money to countries because their grains had
ancient fungus claviceps purpuria that caused
visions & swelling
under the silent claw of the predator?
Was shame in you born before beauty?
Was beauty was shame was beauty?
As white gravel spread under the white churches
as silver sequins on danceless
dresses tacked on each
“hanging by a thread”
like drops of sweat on horses at the city’s edge
while downcast daisies were mimicked on sisterly aprons
catching sugars from women making pudding from boxes
under swamp coolers
with slightly mildewy pads in a breeze
created for doing housework by yourself?
Was it odd to be born when two
types of purslane in the west were called weed,
even agave used to make soap,
though it was home to the yucca moth, central & sweet, its
terminal clusters piercing thunderheads over red pick-up trucks,
& lowly dogbane hiding from developers with sibling roots
of fungi with “no downsides to pesticides”
& florets like diamond periods on certain fonts
also were called weed?
Was it odd to be born near hillsides with radars
like baby ears of question marks
under the silent claw of the predator,
when mountains shook toward sabino canyons
& there was Jello salad at picnics?
Here from this century can you say
was it wild to be born?
Was there anything else like this, anything at all?
Copyright © 2025 by Brenda Hillman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 27, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.