how we survive

I had a pretty bad migraine yesterday and spent the day in bed without once opening my computer. But I did have a poem selected for April 29, and I'm going to post that poem today, alongside my poem for April 30. My last poem this year is a short one, and I think these two go very well together. I also think they're exactly the right way to close out National Poetry Month this year. Thanks for reading, friends. I hope to see you next year. ♥

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

—Joy Harjo, "Perhaps the World Ends Here," from The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1994), but in my case also from Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2023).

*

Don't ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.

—Mosab Abu Toha, "A Rose Shoulders Up," from Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear: Poems from Gaza (City Lights Books, 2022).

anti poetica

there is no poem greater than feeding someone
there is no poem wiser than kindness
there is no poem more important than being good to children
there is no poem outside love's violent potential for cruelty
there is no poem that ends grief but nurses it toward light
there is no poem that isn't jealous of song or murals or wings
there is no poem free from money's ruin
no poem in the capital nor the court
most policy rewords a devil's script
there is no poem in the law
there is no poem in the west
there is no poem in the north
poems only live south of something
meaning beneath & darkened & hot
there is no poem in the winter nor in whiteness
nor are there poems in the landlord's name
no poem to admonish the state
no poem with a key to the locks
no poem to free you

—Danez Smith, "anti poetica" from Bluff (Graywolf Press, 2024). This collection is amazing—no surprise, Danez Smith consistently fucks me up—but I read this poem on its own before reading the collection, and it's even better in context. It's worth knowing, I think, that this is the first of three poems in the collection called "anti poetica" and that there's also an "ars poetica." Other than that, no spoilers. Go read the book.

ache for your life

I promised y'all some bangers.

I've been taught that bloodstones can cure a snakebite,
can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this
when the war ended. The war ended
depending on which war you mean: those we started,
before those, millennia ago and onward,
those which started me, which I lost and won—
these ever-blooming wounds.
I was built by wage. So I wage love and worse—
always another campaign to march across
a desert night for the cannon flash of your pale skin
settling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast.
I dismount my dark horse, bend to you there, deliver you
the hard pull of all my thirsts—
I learned Drink in a country of drought.
We pleasure to hurt, leave marks
the size of stones—each a cabochon polished
by our mouths. I, your lapidary, your lapidary wheel
turning—green mottled red—
the jaspers of our desires.
There are wildflowers in my desert
which take up to twenty years to bloom.
The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand
until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them
in its copper current, opens them with memory—
they remember what their god whispered
into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.
Where your hands have been are diamonds
on my shoulders, down my back, thighs—
I am your culebra.
I am in the dirt for you.
Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous,
two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash
before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood—
the desert returned suddenly to its ancient sea.
Arise the wild heliotrope, scorpion weed,
blue phacelia which hold purple the way a throat can hold
the shape of any great hand—
Great hands is what she called mine.
The rain will eventually come, or not.
Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds—
the war never ended and somehow begins again.

—Natalie Diaz, "Postcolonial Love Poem," from Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020). I believe this poem was originally published (in a slightly earlier form) in The New Republic on February 19, 2016, and I've had it on my list for a while, possibly even since before the collection won a Pulitzer. Like I said, it's a banger.

every ocean is the same ocean

I am not one of nature's collectors, except when it comes to books, and especially when it comes to poetry books in the month of April. Whoops. I'm not mad about it, though! Books are great! Yesterday and today, Lucy and I went to a bunch of different local Houston bookstores and bought more books than we really should have (so many good things, though) in the name of Indie Bookstore Day and the Houston Book Crawl, which is on through the end of the month. They gave us a bingo card and everything! How were we supposed to resist? Anyway, this poem is not from any of the books I bought today, but it is from one of the poetry books we picked up when we were at the Strand in New York last week.

        for the occasion of a dear friends' wedding

Perhaps you've noticed
the way someone yawning
blooms a yawn in your own mouth
as though it were your idea
& not a hand me down,
the way an ocean wave
is not invented out of nothing, but
arrives from somewhere else,
sent from one shoreline of the lopsided planet
to another, so that every ocean
is the same ocean, no matter
what edge of it you are dipping your toes in.
You can stand on a cliff & watch a storm roll towards you,
passed around the globe like wet gossip,
one storm begetting another,
just as my middle school science teacher taught me
that matter cannot be created nor destroyed,
just shifted from one state to the next,
which is comforting on days you miss the dinosaurs
or need to be reminded that many people had to fall in love
with a face at least a little bit like yours
in order for yours to get here.
Maybe God had a good idea one time
& the rest has all been dominoes:
a thunderclap begets a hiccup begets an undertow begets
your certainty that a face was made for you to love it,
but ask the coral reef, who knows we are not good ideas
& definitely not new ones,
more like galactic putty smushed into human form,
who spend so much of our brief time here
losing sight of the storms we came from,
the weather that moves through us,
that we unleash on everyone else.
& who can blame us?
There is no shame in forgetting
that our atoms
once held together some other jellyfish,
when her cheek on your pillow makes your skin
too electric to be called anything but New.
When my grandmother was
nearing the end of her time in the body I knew her in,
she started to lose herself
memory first, but language close behind.
She misused words, mixed up phrases, said things incorrectly.
When she met someone,
instead of saying, it is a pleasure to meet you,
she would say,
it is a pleasure to love you.
She understood
that what feels unknown
is an opportunity for remembering.
In which case, in some future,
when two red-shouldered hawks
see each other for what they think is the first time,
they might suddenly recall
that there was once a day
when we traveled many miles,
some of us whole lifetimes,
so that we could meet you,
here, in love,
& what more evidence will they need
(what more evidence do you need?) to see
that it is
a sincere pleasure to love you
again & again.

—Sarah Kay, "Epithalamion," from A Little Daylight Left (The Dial Press, 2025). Sarah Kay is a slam poet, so I do recommend the video of this poem. For Lucy, obviously.

the instant when love begins

Lucy and I got married (for the second time!) three months ago today, on January 25. At our wedding, this wonderful and classic Mary Oliver poem was one of our readings, and as it turns out I haven't posted it before—which is kind of wild, but I could post nothing but Mary Oliver poems for the next five to ten years and never run out or repeat anything because there are so many and they are all perfect! Anyway, this is an important one. And as almost always with Mary Oliver, I try to live with this one in my heart.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that's often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

—Mary Oliver (1935-2019), "Don't Hesitate," from Swan (2010).

like the cathedral bell

I'm trying to feel this one today, because it is so tender and perfect and beautiful in a week when both Lucy and I are struggling with bad pain days and work stressors and shitty weather and the post-vacation blues, and I have been feeling cranky and prickly for—I was about to say "no good reason," but then I looked at the above reasons—some good reasons but also some stupid ones. So. Lean in to the softness.

Mornings are blind as newborn cats.
Fingernails grow so trustfully, for a while
they don't know what they're going to touch. Dreams
are soft, and tenderness looms over us
like fog, like the cathedral bell of Cracow
before it cooled.

—Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021), "Ode to Softness," from Tremor (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985).

blues

Happy Shakespeare's birthday! Here is a poem about Shakespeare. I have a migraine so that's all the commentary I have in me tonight, but this is a fun poem.

        Essay #1 Mrs. Goldberg's AP Intro to Lit

Shakespeare understood the blues.
He knew parting was such sweet sorrow.
Mr. Shakespeare was the main MC
Of the Elizabethan scene and so I figure

To be or not to be (similar to how you be?)
Be as timeless as hell and as universal
Since such questions never go out of style.
I only wish Othello had sussed out Iago

And taken Iago down to the crossroads
And asked Iago the devil's true-true name.
Juliet is like Lady Gaga (in my HBO rewrite)
And Romeo lives in Harlem with his moms—

Though that's only his nom-de-plume.
He wants to be the first rapper with a PhD.
And Robert Burns smiles to keep from crying
And when he penned the best-made plans

Of mice and men (not rats) often go astray
What he really meant was shit happens.
Dead Old White Men they knew the blues
Though they didn't always know what

They knew okay maybe not even in 1619
By which time Shakespeare was Auld Lang
Syne and Burns was not yet in this world
But the blues isn't stuck on color or CP time.

—Calvin Forbes, "Shakespeare and the Blues," from the October 2016 issue of Poetry Magazine.

count my hopes

This is for Earth Day, but it also now makes me think about Maybe Happy Ending, which we saw in New York last week and absolutely loved. There are some parallels, although this is not (obviously) a poem about fireflies.

so I count my hopes: the bumblebees
are making a comeback, one snug tight
in a purple flower I passed to get to you;

your favorite color is purple but Prince's
was orange & we both find this hard to believe;
today the park is green, we take grass for granted

the leaves chuckle around us; behind
your head a butterfly rests on a tree; it’s been
there our whole conversation; by my old apartment

was a butterfly sanctuary where I would read
& two little girls would sit next to me; you caught
a butterfly once but didn't know what to feed it

so you trapped it in a jar & gave it to a girl
you liked. I asked if it died. you say you like
to think it lived a long life. yes, it lived a long life.

—Fatimah Asghar, "I Don't Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We've Done to the Earth," originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 8, 2019 (where you can listen to the poet read the poem), by the Academy of American Poets.

the improbable lady

I'm slightly more organized this year than I have been for the last few years of National Poetry Month, which means I have some real bangers coming up in the last week of the month. But I'm starting this week here, with Saeed Jones; I saw someone describe this poem as "heartbreakingly lovely," and it really is—I've had it on my list since I first read it at poetryisnotaluxury in 2023.

In this field of thistle, I am the improbable
lady. How I wear the word: sequined weight
snagging my saunter into overgrown grass, blonde
split-end blades. I waltz in an acre of bad wigs.

Sir who is no one, sir who is yet to come, I need you
to undo this zipped back, trace the chiffon
body I've borrowed. See how I switch my hips

for you, dry grass cracking under my pretend
high heels? Call me and I'm at your side,
one wildflower behind my ear. Ask me
and I'll slip out of this softness, the dress

a black cloud at my feet. I could be the boy
wearing nothing, a negligee of gnats.

—Saeed Jones, "Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown," from Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press, 2014).

imp my wing

Every time I post a George Herbert poem on or around Easter I think to myself, "but what if I posted 'Easter Wings' instead?!" The problem with "Easter Wings" is that it's a pattern poem, so the way it's displayed on the page is essential, and that is very annoying to code here in a way that reads effectively. Conveniently, however, the Wikipedia entry about the poem has some images of both manuscript and early print editions, and the text of the poem can be read at Poetry Foundation. So for Easter, go read "Easter Wings," if you care to, and feel some type of way!

And here's a bonus poem, because I was reading through The Temple (it's devotional poetry season) and I really love this one. I missed a day earlier in the month, so I think we can double up on Herbert—it has been a few years.

Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beautie?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines passe, except they do their dutie
            Not to a true, but painted chair?

Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow course-spunne lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lovers loves?
Must all be vail'd, while he that reades, divines,
            Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envie no mans nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with losse of ryme,
            Who plainly say, My God, My King.

—George Herbert (1593-1633), "Jordan (I)" from The Temple, 1633. I took it from the Helen Wilcox edition of The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 2007). This isn't exactly a sonnet (it's fifteen lines), but it follows a lot of sonnet rules, including the turn after line ten. And it's very much in conversation with Sidney and Donne, especially. I love how cranky Herbert is about other poetry, like, "COME ON, GUYS, I CAN WRITE TOTALLY STRAIGHTFORWARD LOVE POETRY ABOUT GOD, OKAY?" (Spoilers: he cannot, he's still a metaphysical poet.)

define life

Every single one of Terrance Hayes' American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is absolutely fucking stellar. I posted one last year, and I'm posting another one this year, but I really recommend the whole book. I like posting sonnets with other sonnets because I love looking at all the things the form can do. Sonnets are magic!! Hayes' sonnet (which I'm posting for today) also directly references the Rilke sonnet I'm posting as a make-up poem for April 16. And if you've been around here at basically any point in the past 18 (?!?!) years of poetry posts, you know I love poetry in conversation with other poetry.

Rilke ends his sonnet "Archaic Torso of Apollo" saying
"You must change your life." James Wright ends "Lying
In a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island,
Minnesota" saying "I have wasted my life." Ruth Stone ends
"A Moment" saying "You do not want to repeat my life."
A minute seed with a giant soul kicking inside it at the end
And beginning of life. After the opening scene where
A car bomb destroys the black detective's family, there are
Several scenes of our hero at the edge of life. A shootout
In an African American Folk Museum, a shootout
In the middle of an interstate rest stop parking lot,
A barn shootout endangering the farm life. I live a life
That burns a hole through life, that leaves a scar for life,
That makes me weep for another life. Define life.

—Terrance Hayes, "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin" ["Rilke ends his sonnet"] from American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018).

*

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), "Archaic Torso of Apollo," in this case from Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell and published by Modern Library (1995).

here in the midst of it

A little Jay Hulme for Good Friday, don't you think? I love this one.

He's here in the midst of it -
right at the centre of the dance floor,
robes hitched up to His knees
to make it easy to spin.

At some point in the evening
a boy will touch the hem of His robe
and beg to be healed, beg to be
anything other than this;

and He will reach His arms out,
sweat-damp, and weary from dance.
He'll cup this boy's face in His hand
and say,

                my beautiful child
there is nothing in this heart of yours
that ever needs to be healed.

—Jay Hulme, "Jesus at the Gay Bar," from The Backwater Sermons (Canterbury Press, 2021). Jay Hulme has some great notes on this poem's theology on his website.

going where I'm going

We're flying home today after a pretty great week of theatre and friends and birthdays (I am very tired but also very happy), so I'm posting this one from the airport. Too on the nose, or just on theme? Either way, Ada Limón never misses.

Every time I'm in an airport
I think I should drastically
change my life: Kill the kid stuff,
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below
the radar like an escaped canine
sneaking along the fence line.
I'd be cable-knitted to the hilt,
beautiful beyond buying, believe in
the maker and fix my problems
with prayer and property.
Then, I think of you, home
with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups—we're small and
flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I'm going, all over again.

—Ada Limón, "The Problem With Travel," from Bright Dead Things, 2015.

islands and lemons

This is a summer poem, and it's not actually that summery today. But it's also a New York City poem, and a love poem, and I've been wanting to post it while in New York for a while. We'll be down on Bleecker later tonight to see a show at the Lucille Lortel.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,
for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom
of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin!

When I press summer dusks together, it is
a month of street accordions and sprinklers
laying the dust, small shadows running from me.

It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,
ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children
tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;
it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water
down littered streets that lead you to no water,
and gathering islands and lemons in the mind.

There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame.
I would undress you in the summer heat,
and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

—Derek Walcott (1930-2017), "Bleecker Street, Summer," from Collected Poems: 1948-1984 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).

a thousand windows and a thousand doors

I was thinking about going back to Auden for today, my 40th birthday, even though I changed the birthday rules in 2020. It's my 40th birthday! Also, I make the rules and can do what I want! I haven't posted any Auden in a couple of years, but I've been thinking about him—and, honestly, he was so prolific that I could just post Auden poems for a few hundred years—and then we went to the New York Public Library today and spent a while walking through the New Yorker Exhibit. And look, I really tried not to post this poem, because it's fucking depressing; it's also incredibly relevant, and also they have a draft manuscript that Auden sent to Benjamin Britten in 1939 in the exhibit at NYPL, so like. Here we are. Warnings for Nazis, etc.

Say this city has ten million souls;
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes,
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair;
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there.
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew;
Every spring it flowers anew.
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The Consul banged the table and said,
"If you've got no passport, you're officially dead."
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a Committee; they offered me a chair,
Asked me politely to return next year.
But where shall we go today, my dear, where shall we go today?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker stood up and said,
"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread."
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder, rumbling in the sky.
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die."
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle wearing a jacket, fastened with a pin;
Saw a door open and a cat let in.
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down to the harbor and stood upon the quay;
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free,
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked into a wood; saw the birds in the trees,
They had no politicians and sang at their ease.
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamt I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows, and a thousand doors.
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Ran down to the station to catch the express;
Asked for two tickets to Happiness,
But every coach was full, my dear, but every coach was full.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973). This is the poem as it was originally published, as "Song," in the April 15, 1939 issue of The New Yorker, but it's more widely known as "Refugee Blues." In the manuscript draft that Auden sent to Britten in March of 1939, it's just called "Blues"—and as the exhibit notes, the poem is set in a meter borrowed from blues music. The poem often appears with some alterations when it's published as "Refugee Blues" (as it is in my edition of Auden); Auden frequently edited after publication, and sometimes went on editing basically forever, so textual consistency with his poems is always very fun. Anyway, thanks for this one, Wystan. I sure do not love that it still hits so hard 86 years later, but I am very grateful that we had poetry then, and still have poetry now.

all the golden nights

This one's for all the shows we've seen (one more on Tuesday, or maybe two if we win a lottery for a Wednesday matinee), and especially for Audra McDonald in Gypsy today. And thanks to my wife for the poem suggestion. ♥

This is the quiet hour; the theaters
Have gathered in their crowds, and steadily
The million lights blaze on for few to see,
Robbing the sky of stars that should be hers.
A woman waits with bag and shabby furs,
A somber man drifts by, and only we
Pass up the street unwearied, warm and free,
For over us the olden magic stirs.
Beneath the liquid splendor of the lights
We live a little ere the charm is spent;
This night is ours, of all the golden nights,
The pavement an enchanted palace floor,
And Youth the player on the viol, who sent
A strain of music through an open door.

—Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), "Broadway," from Rivers to the Sea, 1915. I love a sonnet.

as if the tempest thirsted for the rain

No poem for yesterday because I have been having too much fun?! WE'VE BEEN BUSY. Since arriving in New York, we have seen four shows, been to the Met and the Bronx Zoo, and seen many friends, and I am very tired and may need a vacation from my vacation. Tonight is the first night of Passover, though, so here is a poem that is just a little bit for that.

Night, and the heavens beam serene with peace,
Like a pure heart benignly smiles the moon.
Oh, guard thy blessed beauty from mischance,
This I beseech thee in all tender love.
See where the Storm his cloudy mantle spreads,
An ashy curtain covereth the moon.
As if the tempest thirsted for the rain,
The clouds he presses, till they burst in streams.
Heaven wears a dusky raiment, and the moon
Appeareth dead—her tomb is yonder cloud,
And weeping shades come after, like the people
Who mourn with tearful grief a noble queen.
But look! the thunder pierced night’s close-linked mail,
His keen-tipped lance of lightning brandishing;
He lovers like a seraph-conqueror.—
Dazed by the flaming splendor of his wings,
In rapid flight as in a whirling dance,
The black cloud-ravens hurry scared away.
So, though the powers of darkness chain my soul,
My heart, a hero, chafes and breaks its bonds.

—Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1022 to 1058-70), "Night-Piece," translated from Hebrew by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887). The Academy of American Poets dates this poem to 1889, which is obviously posthumous for both Lazarus and ibn Gabirol, but it was published in The Poems of Emma Lazarus in Two Volumes, Vol. II Jewish Poems: Translations (Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1889). I read it for the first time when it was in Poem-a-Day on May 18, 2024.

accented in gold

It's a two-poem day! This is because yesterday was so absolutely jam-packed that I wasn't at my computer at all. We moved from the airport hotel at LGA to the hotel we're staying at in Manhattan, went to brunch, went to look at cherry blossoms in Central Park, and went to see Wicked. (Which was wonderful! It was Lucy's first time seeing the stage play and I hadn't seen it in like 20 years.) Then we went back to the hotel and Lucy ordered take-out and crashed and I went to dinner with friends and then walked most of the way back to the hotel like an idiot who hasn't lived in New York in over a year and is paying for this with very sore feet and legs today.

Anyway, I kept thinking about this poem while we were walking through Central Park, so here's Ana Božičević for April 9:

Everyone shivering in their
Leather jackets
Eating sandwiches named after
Serial killers
And in the middle of
All of it
Magnolia trees
Enough to make you
Stop and say

Fuck!

Super tenderly.

—Ana Božičević, "Spring 2," published in the NY Tyrant, July 5, 2018.

*

Today's poem is also a little for New York, of course. I really love this poem, and it was always going to be one of the first ones I posted for this week:

for Erika

i ask you what's the first thing you think about
when you see the color yellow & like a real
new yorker, you say yellow cabs. not sunlight
or a yellow ribbon tied around a vase of fresh begonias.
yellow cabs honking down Broadway. i still remember
the night we first shared a cab. you whispered
honey, whispered lace, whispered chrysanthemum.
all that practice & it turns out, i had never ridden
in a cab the right way around us the streetlights blurred
into yellow ribbons, & when you put your hand
on my thigh it was like i knew for the first time
why god gave us thighs. why god gave us hands.
maybe god invented yellow for the cabs,
so the first time we touched like this
it could be accented in gold.

—José Olivarez, "Love Poem Beginning with a Yellow Cab," from Promises of Gold (Macmillan, 2023).

we'll go winging

I woke up feeling like absolute garbage and it's going to be a very long day—our flight to New York for a week of theater and seeing friends (yay!) leaves Houston at 7pm and arrives at LGA a little before midnight. On the plus side, I also woke up thinking about this poem. So here's a little aspirational James Baldwin for today. I am hoping that the migraine meds work and the weather stays gorgeous and our travel is easy and painless, and I am also hoping for good things to come for all of us.

Let this be my summertime
Of azure sky and rolling sea,
And smiling clouds, and wind-kissed laughter,
And just myself entranced with thee.
And children playing in the glory
Of a carefree, youthful day,
And sunshine shining from the heavens,
And tears and sighing fled away.
Let this be my happiness
'Midst the earth's swift-flowing woe.
Let this be my only solace—
Just to know you love me so.
Just to know that we'll go winging,
Far above this earthy clime,
Hand in hand through laughing meadows.
Let this be my summertime.

—James Baldwin (1924-1987), "Paradise," from Magpie (Winter 1941).

come out of your houses drumming

We gotta get some protest poems up in here. Here's Rita Dove, who I adore and haven't posted in a few years.

Listen, no one signed up for this lullaby.
No bleeped sheep or rosebuds or twitching stars
will diminish the fear or save you from waking

into the same day you dreamed of leaving—
mockingbird on back order, morning bells
stuck on snooze—so you might as well

get up and at it, pestilence be damned.
Peril and risk having become relative,
I’ll try to couch this in positive terms:

Never! is the word of last resorts,
Always! the fanatic’s rallying cry.
To those inclined toward kindness, I say

Come out of your houses drumming. All others,
beware: I have discarded my smile but not my teeth.

—Rita Dove, "Incantation of the First Order," originally published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets on October 18, 2021.

almost all elephant

If yesterday had not been grief poems day, I probably would have posted a poem about elephants. We went to see The Great Elephant Migration installation at Hermann Park, here in Houston, which was incredibly cool, and made me go on a little bit of a deep dive into poems about elephants. This is a little one—I seem to be posting a lot of short poems so far this year—and it's not even really about elephants, but I love it.

The room is
almost all
elephant.
Almost none
of it isn’t.
Pretty much
solid elephant.
So there’s no
room to talk
about it.

—Kay Ryan, "The Elephant In The Room." This poem may or may not have originally been published in 2005, but I got it from poetryisnotaluxury, and they got it from Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, edited by Amit Majmudar (Knopf, 2017). It's also possible that Kay Ryan has more than one poem with this title? Google is so fucking useless in the AI era. LET'S TALK ABOUT ELEPHANTS.

one big shadow and one small

I used to be very against prose poems, but in my more relaxed and slightly less pretentious old age (lol), I've read enough good ones that I've come around. Today is April 5, which isn't exactly my brother's yahrzeit, but is the anniversary of his memorial service, and the day—or one of the days, anyway—when I post a poem that has something to do with grief. So here is a really wonderful prose poem about grief.

I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don't say, shhh. I don't say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we've returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I'm with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow and one small.

—Callista Buchen, "Taking Care," from Look Look Look (Black Lawrence Press, 2019)

gather blossoms under fire

This poem is honestly just the whole mood of National Poetry Month.

    for Mel

While love is unfashionable
let us live
unfashionably.
Seeing the world
a complex ball
in small hands;
love our blackest garment.
Let us be poor
in all but truth, and courage
handed down
by the old
spirits.
Let us be intimate with
ancestral ghosts
and music
of the undead.

While love is dangerous
let us walk bareheaded
beside the Great River.
Let us gather blossoms
under fire.

—Alice Walker, "While Love Is Unfashionable" from Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, 1973, although I will fess up to reading it on the wonderful poetryisnotaluxury Instagram. They have a book coming out in May!

allowables

I've been rereading Nikki Giovanni, who died in December. Her writing—her poetry, of course, but also prose—is so wonderful, but one of my favorite things is how spare and simple some of her poems are, and how she can just absolutely punch you in the stomach with like five words. This one, from her 2013 hybrid collection Chasing Utopia (here's the title essay of the book at Poetry Foundation), absolutely haunts me.

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened

—Nikki Giovanni (1943-2024), "Allowables," from Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid (William Morrow, 2013)

heartbreaking

My book club's book for March was Maya Deane's Wrath Goddess Sing, a trans and fantasy-ish retelling of the Iliad. As a long-standing irreverent classicist and fan of iddy fanfic, I enjoyed it a lot, although I did have some quibbles (overall, the fantasy and science fiction elements worked less well for me, and at a certain point I did kind of reach my limit on bonkers shit...lol whoops). But I also could not stop thinking about this poem during our book club meeting on Sunday—it's exactly right tonally, even if it's the Odyssey rather than the Iliad.

When I was a child looking
at my parents' lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.

—Louise Glück (1943-2023), "Telemachus' Detachment" from Meadowlands (Ecco Press, 1996).

love this spring

Good morning, and welcome to National Poetry Month. This means that I will be posting a poem (more or less) every day from now until April 30—life does intervene, and sometimes I skip days or post multiple poems, but I think that's part of the fun.

I started celebrating National Poetry Month in 2007, when I was 21; I turn 40 this year, and it's a little crazy to think that I've been doing this for almost half my life. According to my spreadsheet, I've posted approximately 500 poems. So much has changed in the time I've been doing this—for me, for the world—but poetry remains a constant for me, even while my tastes evolve and what I want from poetry shifts with the times we live in. I'm never exactly sure, going in, what any year's April will bring, but I hope you'll enjoy the journey with me. ♥

I always try to start with a spring poem for April 1 (even when the weather is terrible, as it currently is here in Houston), and I really love this one.

How can I love this spring
when it's pulling me
through my life faster
than any time before it?
When five separate dooms
are promised this decade
and here I am, just trying
to watch a bumblebee cling
to its first purple flower.
I cannot save this world.
But look how it's trying,
once again, to save me.

—James A. Pearson, "This Spring," from The Wilderness That Bears Your Name (Goat Trail Press, 2024). I first encountered this poem on Instagram, which has been a surprisingly excellent source of poetry for me over the last few years.