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The only daily poetry series publishing new work by today’s poets.

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Poem-a-day

The Truth

There was a hole in the wall. Above the head
board set at the head of the bed, a hole,

above my pillow that basked in day light,
but upon which my skull lay at night

beneath a satin eye mask, its nose holes
occupied by air’s entrance, a drafty

sinus, noisy gusts roiling him awake
as summer thunder does, startling

the nerves of canines. When he set
to work patching it up, tracing an outline

of the hole onto a piece of paper, a shape
he used to cut the new patch, to place

the hole’s exact shape, settling it,
gently as a brain surgeon might replace

a skull’s cap, set it back, lowering it
with sterilized tweezers. Then he spackled

the rim of the break. Allowing it to dry,
he sanded it down, later repainting

the wall the same robin’s egg blue so
cleverly you would have thought it had 

never been struck. Or, more accurately,
you would have thought nothing of the wall.

Copyright © 2025 by Cate Marvin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 25, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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Cate Marvin

Cate Marvin
Photo credit: Molly Haley
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About Poem-a-Day

Poem-a-Day is the original and only daily digital poetry series featuring over 250 new, previously unpublished poems by today’s talented poets each year. Randall Mann is the Guest Editor of August. Read or listen to a Q&A with Mann about his curatorial process, and learn more about the 2025 Guest Editors. Support Poem-a-Day.  

If you have any questions about Poem-a-Day, visit our Poem-a-Day FAQ.

Previous Poems

Title Author Date
My Father’s Accent Kaveh Akbar 04/23/2021
The Little Book of Cheerful Thoughts Jeffrey Harrison 04/22/2021
After Reading Kobayashi Issa’s The Spring of My Life On My 49th Birthday Dobby Gibson 04/21/2021
In her mostly white town, an hour from Rocky Mountain National Park, a black poet considers centuries of protests against racialized violence Camille T. Dungy 04/20/2021
Bobolink Didi Jackson 04/19/2021
Near the End of April William Stanley Braithwaite 04/18/2021
Venetian Siesta Joseph Millar 04/17/2021
I Never Wanted to Die Dorianne Laux 04/16/2021
Overlooking the Cortile David St. John 04/15/2021
Memory is Blood Soluble Brian Sneeden 04/14/2021

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