you cannot make a keepsake of this season

HELLO FRIENDS. Today is April 1, which means that it is, once again, National Poetry Month in the U.S., i.e. the best month of the year. I began posting poetry for National Poetry Month in 2007, which makes this the TENTH YEAR I have done this—not the 10-year anniversary, but the tenth year—and I still have not run out of poetry. I don’t anticipate running out of poetry any time soon. National Poetry Month has been with me through a lot of major life changes and big events, through living in two different countries and four different cities, through highs and lows and a whole lot of graduate school; it’s one of my great constants, and I’m thrilled to be doing it again this year. 

In honor of the ten years, and the changing spaces of the internet, I have made this new dedicated poetry blog, here at The Cruelest Month. I am using this blog both to archive all my years of National Poetry Month past (still a work in progress, as is the tagging system, but it will get there), and to post new poems going forward. I will be doing some cross-posting this year (it’s a hard habit to break), but mostly linking to this blog; I encourage those of you who enjoy National Poetry Month to read (and comment, if you want to) here.

To start us off, this year, a poem that is about spring, and feelings, and time: 

                  I snap the twig to try to trap

the springing and I relearn the same lesson.

You cannot make a keepsake of this season. 

Your heart’s not the source of that sort of sap,

lacks what it takes to fuel, rejects the graft,

though for a moment it’s your guilty fist 

that’s flowering. You’re no good host to this

extremity that points now, broken, back at

the dirt as if to ask are we there yet.

You flatter this small turn tip of a larger 

book of matches that can’t refuse its end,

re-fuse itself, un-flare. Sure. Now forget

again. Here’s a new green vein, another

clutch to take, give, a handful of seconds.

—Dora Malech (b. 1981), "Each Year," 2010. I just discovered Dora Malech, and I kind of love her. Check out her website: here.