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.)