swept our hearts clean

A little devotional-ish poetry for Easter Monday. I love Joy Harjo.

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear;
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

—Joy Harjo, "Eagle Poem," from In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), but in my case from a very lovely signed copy of Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years (Norton, 2023).

keep singing

My brother Pete died fifteen years ago in March, which is kind of crazy to think about. How can it have been fifteen years? How has it only been fifteen years? (Maybe less the second one, but later this month I turn 41, which is the age he was when he died, and that sure makes me feel some type of way.) Grief is a very strange thing, and sometimes poetry helps me understand it better, or at least feel less alone in something that is often isolating, even while being completely universal. Since 2012—or 2011, I guess, if you count the original day—I've been posting grief poems on April 5, the anniversary of the day we held his memorial.

This poem is from Gregory Orr's How Beautiful the Beloved, which is a whole book of perfect little gems like this one.

Grief will come to you.
Grip and cling all you want,
It makes no difference.

Catastrophe? It's just waiting to happen.
Loss? You can be certain of it.

Flow and swirl of the world.
Carried along as if by a dark current.

All you can do is keep swimming;
All you can do is keep singing.

—Gregory Orr, "Grief will come to you," from How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).

give me fire

A little Audre Lorde for a gloomy Saturday, and for my wife.

Give me fire and I will sing you morning
Finding you heart
And a birth of fruit
For you, a flame that will stay beauty
Song will take us by by the hand
And lead us back to light.

Give me fire and I will sing you evening
Asking you water
And quick breath
No farewell winds like a willow switch
Against my body
But a voice to speak
In a dark room.

—Audre Lorde (1934-1992), "A Lover's Song," from The First Cities (1968), and in this case from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (Norton, 1997).

inside you, open

This is the very first poem in the wonderful poetryisnotaluxury book, which came out last year and is beautiful and perfect because the person or people who run that account have impeccable taste. This poem is an old favorite, and also beautiful and perfect, but I can't lie: it inevitably reminds me of two fics that thefourthvine titled from it, back in the day. In this new era of Hockey RPF-adjacent fandoms, my Sid/Geno roots go deep, and for obvious reasons, I have recently been doing quite a bit of rereading. I also just love this poem.

Look at the birds. Even flying
is born

out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, open

at either end of day.
The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.

—Li-Young Lee, "One Heart," from Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001), and in this case also from Poetry Is Not a Luxury: Poems for All Seasons (Washington Square Press, 2025).

the same atoms

It's been a hard day, so here is a poem for that. Clint Smith simply never fails.

Some evenings, after days when the world feels
like it has poured all of its despair onto me,
when I am awash with burdens that rests atop
my body like a burlap of jostling shadows,

I find a place to watch the sun set. I dig
my feet into a soil that has rebirthed itself
a millions times over. I listen to the sound
of leaves as they decide whether or not

it is time to descend from their branches.
It is hard to describe the comfort one feels
in sitting with something you trust will always be
there, something you can count on to remain

familiar when all else seems awry. How remarkable
it is to know that so many have watched the same
sun set before you. How the wind can carry
pollen and drop it somewhere it has never been.
How the leaves have always become the soil

that then become the leaves again. How maybe
we are not so different from the leaves.
How maybe we are also always being reborn
to be something more than we once were.

How maybe that's what waking up each morning is.
A reminder that we are born
of the same atoms as every plant and bird
and mountain and ocean around us.

—Clint Smith, "For the Hardest Days," from Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing, 2016).

ready to start again

Hi everyone, did you know that it is somehow already April?! Yeah, I don't know where the hell this year has gone. 2026 has not been super kind to us, so far, but there have been some lights in the darkness, and poetry is always one of them for me. If you're new here (who is new here in 2026, lol), I will be posting a poem every day (more or less) from now until April 30 in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year is the 30th anniversary of NPM, which started in 1996; I started posting poems in 2007, so next year will be my 20th anniversary. Time sure does keep happening.

As I always say, 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 saw this poem on Instagram in the middle of the month last April and immediately put it on my spreadsheet to open this year. Sometimes I can stick to a plan!

Maybe January was never meant
to be the beginning.
Maybe the year starts slowly
on purpose—
a quiet stretch,
a deep inhale,
the soft ache of waking up.

Maybe February was shaking off,
and March was the gathering
of strength—
a slow return to ourselves.

And maybe April
is when it really begins.
When the light lingers,
when our hearts beat louder,
when we are truly ready
to start again—
not because we should,
but because we're finally
warm enough to want to.

—Kaylin Weir, "April Theory," posted to Instagram on April 13, 2025.

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.