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Megan Fernandes, “May to December,” in I Do Everything I’m Told

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also a poem from the new, unreleased collection. very possibly my own all-time favourite.

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Robert Frost, in a letter to a letter to Louis Untermeyer, dated 1 January 1916, from The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer

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Fauna, Richard Siken

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Sylvia Plath reading her poem, "Daddy"

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one grey toe Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich. I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene

An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat moustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, o You

Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do

But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, Im finally through. The black telephones off at the root, The voices just cant worm through.

If Ive killed one man, Ive killed two The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now.

Theres a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, Im through.

from The Restored Edition of "Ariel"

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oh man. oh jeez

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— richard siken

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Spring Apples,  Lillia Frantin

lilliafrantinstudio.com

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Earlier poems of William Carlos Williams, 1938/1951

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— I Loved You by Alexander Pushkin (translated by A.Z. Foreman)

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Charles Baudelaire, “A Voyage To Cythera”

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To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

Mary Oliver, from "In Blackwater Woods" in American Primitive

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Joy Sullivan, from “These Days People Are Really Selling Me On California”, Instructions for Traveling West

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Joy Sullivan, “Even If”, Instructions for Traveling West

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She wasn't crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she'd accepted that with her that was just the way things were. But I think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling.

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

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Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea 

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Citizen Illegal, José Olivarez