Assault
—after Edna St. Vincent Millay
I.
I forget there were good things, too—
Revere Beach and feeding seagulls soggy french fries,
watching them plunge into the sand, then emerge,
the red spot of their beaks mistaken for ketchup.
II.
Beauty intercepts the drive home. The sky
beckons with its clouds the shape of a ribcage
opening upward. Another is a honeycomb.
Imagine being brushed by the air enough times.
Imagine you’re unrecognizable.
Copyright © 2026 by Diannely Antigua. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 18, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Written after Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem of the same name, this piece moves through memory and the small interruptions of beauty that arrive without warning. A childhood afternoon feeding seagulls soggy fries lingers beside a later moment on the road, when clouds briefly transform shape against the sky. Rather than naming the harm directly, the poem stays with the before and the after, attending to how memory shifts, how perception changes, and how the body, brushed again and again by the world, might slowly become something new, both terrifying and luminous.”
—Diannely Antigua
Diannely Antigua
Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship. She received her MFA at New York University, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy.
Antigua is the author of Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024) and Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award.