Poetry Month, Jenny Xie

 To Be a Good Buddhist Is Ensnarement
 ~Jenny Xie

The Zen priest says I am everything I am not.
 
In order to stop resisting, I must not attempt to stop resisting.
 
I must believe there is no need to believe in thoughts.
 
Oblivious to appetites that appear to be exits, and also entrances.
 
What is there to hoard when the worldly realm has no permanent
      vacancies?
 
Ten years I’ve taken to this mind fasting.
 
My shadow these days is bare.
 
It drives a stranger, a good fool.
 
Nothing can surprise.
 
Clarity is just questioning having eaten its fill.

Copyright © 2018 Jenny Xie. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Month, Diannely Antigua

 Anniversary
~Diannely Antigua

Outside, an abandoned mattress sags with rain
and the driveway turns all sludge when I remember
I could’ve died eight years ago, in a bed
smaller than the one I share with a new lover
who just this morning found another grey hair in my afro,
and before resettling the wiry curl with the others,
kissed the freckle on my forehead.
I admit, I don’t know a love that doesn’t
destroy. Last night while we slept,
a mouse drowned in the rice pot
I left soaking in the sink. I tried
to make a metaphor out of this, the way
he took the mouse to the edge of the lake in the yard,
released it to a deeper grave. It was
an anniversary, just my lover
taking a dead thing away, taking it
somewhere I couldn’t see.

Copyright © 2020 by Diannely Antigua. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 28, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Month, Claire Meuschke

 zero in on
~Claire Meuschke

I turn on a light in a room I pace away from
take comfort behind neon signs    nested in wires
an errant mirror propped against a commercial strip
or cradled awkwardly in the elbows of a passerby
my legs become their legs
mushrooms came before us needing no light
now they clean up oil spills    rebuild biomes
ripped green awnings of my youth have become
sleek noun and noun stores like Gold and Rust where 
you can buy boutique sticks    stones    dead flowers
I’m more turned on by the defunct Mustang
its turquoise alive in the rain    nostalgia is dangerous 
turquoise that took millions of years to form   mined up
when there was one woman per one thousand men
Jin Ho threw herself into the bay when she learned
she would be sold into prostitution
threw herself not jumped so even in history she is 
an object possessing herself in an act of dispossession 
you make everything about yourself    
as if there’s another realm where I am real
if only    there was something essential    
an oil I could purchase that would reflect only you 
in my floral wrists shielding my eyes
here    take everything    my social security number
my hope that the rush of a population will crash

Copyright © 2020 by Claire Meuschke. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 29, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Month, Khaty Xiong

 The Seven Prisms of My Blood
~Khaty Xiong

after Yvan Goll

In the absent oils of your eyes two brown ores
resting leisurely on the view of your children.

You uncoil casually. My hand slipping
to the west and what was felled fills me

until I fall forward injuring your already dead arm.
I am so sorry. Our wills in a twist. Electric.

Some pulse between the gurney and the distant coffin.
My camera shutter clicking wildly around my neck.

Back home tus rab hlau searches for your hands.
The soil to harden. Rapture on the way. Onions

sprouting passionately as neglected gardens do.
The seven prisms of my blood bursting through my ears.

Your living children still living. Your garden goddess
drying the last goods in her shrine. With spring-like

precision the sun weeps until I boil. My head cracked
in four places. The ribbed earth catching fatal drops

of your blood or mine. You beseech me but in my time
I’ve slept away the sun. The underside of distance.

But I behold you now in this cool church and for a ransom.
I photograph you again and again. Your form crystalizing.

Your parted mouth a new annex to the ancestral house.
Your bones at the table. O how fair the jaundiced skies.

You get up to close that clear brittle door.

Copyright © 2020 by Khaty Xiong. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 10, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Month, W. S. Merwin

 The Wings of Daylight

 ~W. S. Merwin

Brightness appears showing us everything

it reveals the splendors it calls everything

but shows it to each of us alone

and only once and only to look at

not to touch or hold in our shadows

what we see is never what we touch

what we take turns out to be something else

what we see that one time departs untouched

while other shadows gather around us

the world’s shadows mingle with our own

we had forgotten them but they know us

they remember us as we always were

they were at home here before the first came

everything will leave us except the shadows

but the shadows carry the whole story

at first daybreak they open their long wings

W. S. Merwin, “The Wings of Daylight” from Garden Time. Copyright © 2016 by W. S. Merwin.

 from “Please Bury Me in This”
 ~Allison Benis White

Now my neighbor through the wall playing piano, I imagine, with her

          eyes closed.
 
When she stops playing, she disappears.
 
I am still waiting for the right words to explain myself to you.
 
When there was nothing left to smoke, I drew on my lips with a pen

            until they were black.
 
Or is this what it means to be empty: to make no sound?
 
I pressed my mouth to the wall until I’d made a small gray ring.
 
Or maybe emptiness is a form of listening.
 
Maybe I am just listening.

Copyright © 2016 Allison Benis White. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Month, Vanessa Angelica Villarreal (it might be a repeat)

 Corpse Flower
 ~Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Yesterday, the final petal curled its soft lure into bone.
 
The flowerhead shed clean, I gathered up your spine
 
and built you on a dark day. You are still missing
 
some parts. Each morning, I curl red psalms into the shells
 
in your chest. I have buried each slow light: cardinal’s yolk, live
          seawater,
 
my trenza, a piece of my son’s umbilical cord, and still you don’t
          return.
 
A failure fragrant as magic. Ascend the spirit into the design.
 
My particular chiron: the record that your perfect feet ever graced
 
this earth. Homing signal adrift among stars, our tender impossible
          longing.
 
What have I made of your sacrifice. This bone: it is myself.

  

Copyright © 2018 Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Month, Aldo Amparan

 Aubade at the City of Change
~Aldo Amparán

In this city
each door I cross
in search of your room

grows darker
than the sky, this silver
dome of morning spread

across the urban smog.
Country dark washes the city
light off the outskirts

& beyond

where you sleep in hiding,
where your face
wrapped in gauze

shines like sequin
in the lingering moon-drizzle.
I reach for you

at the corners of the clubs,
inside motel rooms,

where rent boys tumble
perspired bed sheets,
doubling you, your maleness

discharged,
your hipbones sticking
to my thighs, hard

stubble of your legs
scratching. The night I followed
a strange road, looking

to forget all this, starlight
spooled the gravel ribbon
leading back to the city

behind me, back
to the hospital room
where I last saw you—

Tonight, I’ll rest
on this road, I’ll look back
to the city of change

where one year
two skyscrapers lifted, a park
shed trees

for new thoroughfares,
& an old cinema
erupted to rebuild itself

in its place. I’ll stay
on the pavement,
suspended in time

like the broken sign announcing
You are entering ______, (a name

changed two years ago),
& I’ll wonder
if the hot breeze

blowing the nape
of my neck
is your unchanged

breath rising like candle
smoke from the city.

Copyright © 2021 by Aldo Amparán. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 4, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Month! Tanaya Winder

 Becoming a Ghost
~Tanaya Winder

Ask me about the time
my brother ran towards the sun
arms outstretched. His shadow chased him
from corner store to church
where he offered himself in pieces.

Ask me about the time
my brother disappeared. At 16,
tossed his heartstrings over telephone wire,
dangling for all the rez dogs to feed on.
Bit by bit. The world took chunks of
my brother’s flesh.

Ask me about the first time
we drowned in history. 8 years old
during communion we ate the body of Christ
with palms wide open, not expecting wine to be
poured into our mouths. The bitterness
buried itself in my tongue and my brother
never quite lost his thirst for blood or vanishing
for more days than a shadow could hold.

Ask me if I’ve ever had to use
bottle caps as breadcrumbs to help
my brother find his way back home.
He never could tell the taste between
a scar and its wounding, an angel or demon.

Ask me if I can still hear his
exhaled prayers: I am still waiting to be found.
To be found, tell me why there is nothing
more holy than becoming a ghost.

Copyright © 2020 by Tanaya Winder. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 17, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Month, Ada Limon: she must be reading my mind

 Give Me This
~Ada Limón

I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

Copyright © 2020 by Ada Limón. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 16, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Month, Jesus Castillo

 Untitled
 ~Jesús Castillo

          Dear Empire, I am confused each time I wake inside you.
                        You invent addictions.  
          Are you a high-end graveyard or a child?
                        I see your children dragging their brains along.
                        Why not a god who loves water and dancing
                     instead of mirrors that recite your pretty features only?
          You wear a different face to each atrocity.
          You are un-unified and tangled.
                        Are you just gluttony?
                        Are you civilization’s slow grenade?
 
           I am confused each time I’m swallowed by your doors.
 
Copyright © 2018 Jesús Castillo. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Month, Lynn Melnick

 When Bad Things Happen to Good People
 ~Lynn Melnick

You can only hear you look like a hooker so many times
before you become one. Spandex was really big
 
the year I stopped believing.
I babysat for the rabbi’s son, Isaac. There was luxe carpet
 
in every room of the condo. Isaac liked Legos
and we made a pasture and a patriarch and lots of wives.
 
In his car in his garage the rabbi handed me a self-help book
and put my hand on his crotch, ready to go.
 
I didn’t care.
I made good money.
 
Isaac lived to be 180 according to the bible.
Isaac is the only patriarch who didn’t have concubines.
 
Isaac is 30 now. Modern scholarship tells us
 
the patriarchs never existed. Experience taught me
the patriarchs are all we’ve got.
 
 
Copyright © 2019 Lynn Melnick. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 8, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Month, Traci Brimhall

 Fledgling
 ~Traci Brimhall

I scare away rabbits stripping the strawberries
in the garden, ripened ovaries reddening
their mouths. You take down the hanging basket
and show it to our son—a nest, secret as a heart,
throbbing between flowers. Look, but don’t touch,
you instruct our son who has already begun
to reach for the black globes of a new bird’s eyes,
wanting to touch the world. To know it.
Disappointed, you say: Common house finch,
as if even banal miracles aren’t still pink
and blind and heaving with life. When the cat
your ex-wife gave you died, I was grateful.
I’d never seen a man grieve like that
for an animal. I held you like a victory,
embarrassed and relieved that this was how
you loved. To the bone of you. To the meat.
And we want the stricken pleasure of intimacy,
so we risk it. We do. Every day we take down
the basket and prove it to our son. Just look
at its rawness, its tenderness, it’s almost flying.

Copyright © 2017 Traci Brimhall. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Month, E E Cummings

 Crepuscule
 ~E. E. Cummings

I will wade out
                             till my thighs are steeped in burn-
ing flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
                                                   Alive
                                                                 with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
                                            in the sleeping curves of my
body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
                                                  Will I complete the mystery
of my flesh
I will rise
                After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
              And set my teeth in the silver of the moon

 

This poem is in the public domain.

Poetry Thursday, Poetry Month! Rafael Campo

 California
~Rafael Campo

I used to dream of living here. I hike

a trail I know that at the end opens

to glorious views of the city I did

live in once, when men my age kept dying

while I learned how to diagnose AIDS.

Some dreams don’t come true, and some dreams become

nightmares. Across a field that smells of sage,

a few horses loiter. I want to think

that they forgive me, since they’re noble creatures.

They stamp and snort, reminding me they know

nothing of forgiveness. I used to dream

that someday I’d escape to San Francisco,

when I was still in high school and I knew.

Tall and muscled, the horses are like the jocks

on the football team who beat me once, as if pain

teaches truth and they knew I had to learn.

I used to dream I was as white as them,

that I could slam my locker closed and not

think of jail. Some nightmares come true,

like when my uncle got arrested for

cocaine. My family never talked about it,

which made me realize they could also feel shame.

That’s when I started dreaming I could be

a doctor someday, that I could get away,

prescribe myself a new life. Right now, as

the city comes into view, I think of those

animals and hope they got what they deserved.

The city stretches out its arms, its two bridges

to Oakland, to Stockton, to San Rafael,

to Vallejo; places I could have been from

but wasn’t. It looks just as it did

all those years ago. Yet I know it’s changed

because so many of us died, like Rico,

who took me up here for the first time.

We kicked a soccer ball around and smoked

a joint. I think we talked about our dreams,

but who can remember dreams. I look out

and the sun like your hand on my face

is warm, and for a moment I think this is

glorious, this is what forgiveness feels like.

Copyright © 2020 by Rafael Campo. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 5, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Month, Oliver Wendell Holmes

 Departed Days
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Yes, dear departed, cherished days,
   Could Memory’s hand restore
Your morning light, your evening rays
   From Time’s gray urn once more,—
Then might this restless heart be still,
   This straining eye might close,
And Hope her fainting pinions fold,
   While the fair phantoms rose.
 
But, like a child in ocean’s arms,
   We strive against the stream,
Each moment farther from the shore
   Where life’s young fountains gleam;—
Each moment fainter wave the fields,
   And wider rolls the sea;
The mist grows dark,—the sun goes down,—
Day breaks,—and where are we?

This poem is in the public domain.

Poetry Month! Vijay Seshadri

 Enlightenment
 ~Vijay Seshadri

“It’s all empty, empty,”
he said to himself.
“The sex and drugs. The violence, especially.”
So he went down into the world to exercise his virtue,
 
thinking maybe that would help.
He taught a little kid to build a kite.
He found a cure,
and then he found a cure
 
for his cure.
He gave a woman at the mercy of the weather
his umbrella, even though
icy rain fell and he had pneumonia.
He settled a revolution in Spain.
 
Nothing worked.
The world happens, the world changes,
the world, it is written here,
in the next line,
is only its own membrane—
 
and, oh yes, your compassionate nature,
your compassion for our kind.

Copyright © 2018 Vijay Seshadri. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Month, Jason Reynolds

 Match
~Jason Reynolds

on the days the dark is vanta vicious

enough to swallow whole every holy

thing like my mother and the stigmata

she bleeds from a totem of raising black

on the days the cold is cold as all get out but

there’s no place to get in when even breath is

blade and hurts to think of thinking of breathing

let alone laughing

on the days I feel frayed and ‘fraid ripped

and torn from the lot plucked from family

and ‘nem and even myself sometimes my

name is the name of a stranger

my face still the face in the hole of a

hoodie just snatched out my own world

never mine and dragged and scraped

across the rough textured parts of this

being alive thing

i’m reminded of what it feels

like to have my head alight to

have it catch fire and blaze-lick

high above me and all this

i’m reminded to return to the truth that oh

yeah me my little self a match my little

self a cardboard cutout might could burn

this whole so-called kingdom down

Copyright © 2020 by Jason Reynolds. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 28, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Month, Sandburg

 Monotone
~Carl Sandburg

    The monotone of the rain is beautiful, 
And the sudden rise and slow relapse 
Of the long multitudinous rain. 

    The sun on the hills is beautiful, 
Or a captured sunset sea-flung, 
Bannered with fire and gold. 

    A face I know is beautiful—
With fire and gold of sky and sea, 
And the peace of long warm rain.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 12, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets. 

Poetry Thursday, Poetry Month! Louise Gluck

 The Red Poppy
~Louise Glück

The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.

From The Wild Iris, published by The Ecco Press, 1992. Copyright © 1992 by Louise Glück. All Rights reserved. Used with permission. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on October 10, 2020.

Poetry Month, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 Song
 ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest;
Home-keeping hearts are happiest,
For those that wander they know not where
Are full of trouble and full of care;
       To stay at home is best.
 
Weary and homesick and distressed,
They wander east, they wander west,
And are baffled and beaten and blown about
By the winds of the wilderness of doubt;
       To stay at home is best.
 
Then stay at home, my heart, and rest;
The bird is safest in its nest;
O’er all that flutter their wings and fly
A hawk is hovering in the sky;
       To stay at home is best.
 

This poem is in the public domain.

Poetry Month, Trumbull Stickney

 Six O'Clock
 ~Trumbull Stickney

Now burst above the city’s cold twilight
The piercing whistles and the tower-clocks:
For day is done. Along the frozen docks
The workmen set their ragged shirts aright.
Thro’ factory doors a stream of dingy light
Follows the scrimmage as it quickly flocks
To hut and home among the snow’s gray blocks.—
I love you, human labourers. Good-night!
Good-night to all the blackened arms that ache!
Good-night to every sick and sweated brow,
To the poor girl that strength and love forsake,
To the poor boy who can no more! I vow
The victim soon shall shudder at the stake
And fall in blood: we bring him even now.

This poem is in the public domain.

Poetry Month, Robert Frost

 Good Hours
~Robert Frost

I had for my winter evening walk—
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow.
 
And I thought I had the folk within:
I had the sound of a violin;
I had a glimpse through curtain laces
Of youthful forms and youthful faces.
 
I had such company outward bound.
I went till there were no cottages found.
I turned and repented, but coming back
I saw no window but that was black.
 
Over the snow my creaking feet
Disturbed the slumbering village street
Like profanation, by your leave,
At ten o’clock of a winter eve.

This poem is in the public domain.

For Poetry Month

 1918, Iva Describes Her Deathbed
~LeAnne Howe
No, it wasn’t like that—you didn’t see
He was lying quietly, mouth shut, one hand on his chest,
The other frozen mid-stir

We were be side one another
When they found us
                          Be side, what a wonderful word
Be side is the scent I carry
Be side the first man I touched
And his touching me.
Be side him when I woke.
Fully awake,
                          I hear something,
                          Our baby perhaps or
A kitten crying for a saucer of milk
A kitten crying because she is lost
Because she is forsaken
Because she is left alive.
No, not the cat,
Me

Give me your hand, John Hoggatt
Remember our fishing hole at Byng?
A cold underground stream feeds it,
Gorgeous switch canes at the blue water’s edge 
Make sturdy Cherokee baskets
Remember?

Give me your hand, John
Together we’ll catch a mess of perch,
Cut the canes and load the wagon
We’ll have the folks over for supper
Just a half day’s wagon ride away,
Not far.

Give me your hand, dearest
Just last fall we helped build the Byng P.O.
Named in honor of Sir Julian Byng,
A British World War I hero.
Your father had a conniption.
You an Irishman, putting an Englishman forward!

Give me your hand, Johnny boy
I call you home now and I call you home tomorrow,
A thousand times as our bodies flake into stars,
Mad or sane, Get up John Hoggatt!
You can’t stay in this death bed
You—
Walk on Iva, says John, softly.
Walk on my girl,
My girl,
My

Copyright © 2020 by LeAnne Howe. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 11, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Month! (back posting)

 Disclosure
~Camisha L. Jones

I’m sorry, could you repeat that. I’m hard of hearing.
To the cashier
To the receptionist
To the insistent man asking directions on the street

I’m sorry, I’m hard of hearing. Could you repeat that?
At the business meeting
In the writing workshop
On the phone to make a doctor’s appointment

I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-so-sorry-I’m-hard-for-the-hearing

Repeat.

            Repeat.

Hello, my name is Sorry
To full rooms of strangers
I’m hard to hear

I vomit apologies everywhere
They fly on bat wings
towards whatever sound beckons

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry
             and repeating
                          and not hearing

Dear (again)
I regret to inform you

I       am

here
 
 
Copyright © 2020 by Camisha L. Jones. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 3, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month! (back posting)

 Polycystic Study of Intimacy
~Aricka Foreman

But where do the breasts go first is my question.
I understand their fantasies of fleeing south. 

The winters are loud and long and white 
and by March, well. I wonder why I’m still 

in it too. Now the round pits thumb up 

beneath the skin, tender and hot to the touch, 

crushed by my new weight. This island I’ve 
had to make of myself brought a bevy, 

angered by easy pleasures: sugar, soy sauce, 
potatoes, ice cream. My love’s language 

is to make a meal, ask what I can take in, 
ask what maladies to avoid. As for my house:

touch is far and few between. Desire wanes 
between compresses of cloves cinnamon turmeric 

and honey. But in the mornings, a gulf between us, 
my hands are kissed. The blinds drawn to keep

the sun from disturbing my sleep while we wait 
patiently for my body’s quiet prayer of thanks.

Copyright © 2020 by Aricka Foreman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 20, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.