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There’s no going back; the vivid colors will fade; a poem is the only answer. This one comes from Sarah Arvio’s collection Cry Back My Sea: 48 Poems in 6 Waves.

Tanager

This was the year I saw the tanager flitting out from behind a tall tree like Tanny Le Clercq wearing scarlet and then turning she twirled and was gone cutting a tangent through the sky of my life and the effect was as tangible as a trip to Tangier This was the year of bright change the year of the dress the lovely fire-red dress and black shawl that would take me to the sunset or sunrise And it moved in me like Tanny Le Clercq fire tones leaping in a fiery thrill Wouldn’t you live for a tangential thrill that goes to the skin and bones and sex to all the bright points and colors of your life I had seen it in books —the tanager— a bright black-winged cry bringing me up to its tablet of joy its template of joy its plateful of fruit The tangerine tanager that should be its name and how do I eat it and dance it and do it again this once-only moment of life

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Cry Back My Sea by Sarah Arvio.

Browse other books by Sarah Arvio and follow her on Instagram @sarah_arvio.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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The poet Stan Rice is one of Michael Dickman’s important Knopf forebears, and he selected a poem for today from Stan’s final book, False Prophet. “Written at the end of Stan’s life during a losing battle with brain cancer, when he was at times tied to a chair,” Michael writes, “this collection of sixty-one poems takes off where the Bible ends, and is one of the most beautiful and brutal lyrical sequences from the last hundred years of poetry in English. ‘Psalm 184’ is one of my favorites, a poem I’ve read over and over and cannot turn away from. Who among us isn’t damaged and wouldn’t like a clean slate? Who among us wouldn’t like to be turned into good news?”

Psalm 184

I who am damaged need a clean slate And a plan. Turn me Into good news. The crusade that ends in hugs Continues as speaking tours. In answer to your question The spirit is always busy. And we have powerful dreams, Very accurate and specific About particulars you can check out in the news. Fighter jets flew from a turkey. Its rear waxed over. Then the prophets lit up By being grafted together. Keen was the cry of the post. All soft arms rush to the aid of intelligence. And the godless are as forgotten as flies Though they make a noise like the sea.                                                             Selah.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about False Prophet by Stan Rice and Pacific Power & Light by Michael Dickman.

Browse other books by Stan Rice and Michael Dickman.

See Michael Dickman in conversation with fellow poets Willard Spiegelman, Richie Hofmann, and Deborah Landau at the Montclair Literary Festival on April 27. The “Becoming a Poet” panel begins at 1:45 pm in University Hall on the campus of Montclair State University.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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We asked Richie Hofmann, author of the sexy collection A Hundred Lovers, to choose a poem by one of his Knopf forebears. He came back within minutes with J. D. McClatchy’s “Late Night Ode.” Richie writes, “I adore McClatchy’s poem, a wry and witty tribute to middle age and the middle of the night—‘It’s over, love’ the perfect opening—which fights back its precise and beautifully rendered breakup song to reveal something romantic, lush, and unforgettable. Even after love is gone, the poet reminds us, we’re still reaching for it through the ‘bruised, unbalanced waves.’”

Late Night Ode

It’s over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,      Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears, The piles and boggy prostate, the crooked penis,      The sour taste of each day’s first lie,

And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling      A swaying bead-chain of moonlight, Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark      Along a body like my own, but blameless.

What good’s my cut-glass conversation now,      Now I’m so effortlessly vulgar and sad? You get from life what you can shake from it?      For me, it’s g and t’s all day and CNN.

Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level      At eighty grand, who pouts about the overtime, Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,      And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.

There���s your hound from heaven, with buccaneer      Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples. His answering machine always has room for one more      Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who.

Some nights I’ve laughed so hard the tears      Won’t stop. Look at me now. Why now? I long ago gave up pretending to believe      Anyone’s memory will give as good as it gets.

So why these stubborn tears? And why do I dream      Almost every night of holding you again, Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,      Through the bruised unbalanced waves?

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Plundered Hearts by J. D. McClatchy and A Hundred Lovers by Richie Hofmann.

Browse other books by J. D. McClatchy and follow Richie Hofmann on Instagram @richiehof.

See Richie Hofmann in conversation with fellow poets Willard Spiegelman, Michael Dickman, and Deborah Landau at the Montclair Literary Festival on April 27. The “Becoming a Poet” panel begins at 1:45 pm in University Hall on the campus of Montclair State University.  

Hear Richie Hofmann join Kevin Young on The New Yorker's Poetry Podcast to read “Twilight,” by Henri Cole, and his own poem “French Novel.”

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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The memoir Pretty, out next month from the young Black trans writer KB Brookins, uses both poems and prose to explore their coming of age “in a city most call Dallas, but Texans know is Fort Worth”—swinging on porches and making childhood memories like any kid, while also struggling with the self-denial unique to children who grow up in communities where there is no support for LGBTQIA+ youth. “None of the boxes were big enough to fit me,” Brookins writes. “‘Texas, why don’t you want me here?’ was a sentence written continuously in my journal and my heart.” Each chapter of this frank and undaunted book ends with a poem, a couple of which pay homage to the great Gwendolyn Brooks, who first taught us to play hooky in verse.

We skip school to listen

to Jill Scott as we spin on a merry-go-round. We say I’ll miss you & that’s the mushiest we got, for now. We make MLK community center our home away from gays too afraid to be honest. We look up at the muggy sky, humming riffs of A Long Walk. We walk back to school, where we drop into days that queer like midnight clouds. We think I love you, instead say let’s go back before the hall monitors trip. We trip on melted sidewalks that make grooves of their own in the shape of our feet. We skip school to swing jump & stumble into our new love

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Pretty by KB Brookins.

Browse other books by KB Brookins and follow them on Instagram and Twitter @earthtokb.

Hear KB Brookins read from their new poetry collection at Powell's Books in Portland, OR on June 3 at 7:00 PM. KB Brookins will also be at The Booksmith in San Francisco on June 4 at 7:00 PM.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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Brenda Shaughnessy’s poems in Tanya invite us into deep and playful conversation with the work of women artists who have come before us. Here, she riddles on Meret Oppenheim’s classic “Object” of 1936: a fur-lined tea cup and saucer with fur-covered spoon alongside.

The Impossible Lesbian Love Object(s)

—after Meret Oppenheim’s Object

1. It’s just an object, it’s not me.

I’m more than an object, we are not having tea.

I am not one, not two. I am a feminist three.

I am Dada—not Mama, never will be.

When no one can use me, I am most free.

2. I am not like other objects unaware of themselves, those props subbing for desire:

the corner of the room thinks the room is one-cornered, that cat sculpture staring as if with its eyes.

I, too, am a mammal stolen from my original sense of thirst. Women know this disappearance from meaning.

Like all lesbian triptychs, I’ve stumbled. Like all love objects, I am triangular, unstable.

I’m a lonely trio, a single setting, vexed and passive, sexed and distracted.

A hot drink, a pot on the fire, the muscles loosened, an inner stirring, a little spill,

the coat on the floor. The fur coat on the floor. The curved fur floor atop another fur circle

to never catch a drop and a concave face with convex back, swirling nothing.

None of it really happening. I was once and always only ever an idea,

just a clever blip, a quip, a dare, converted by coin and concept,

given body, shape, hair, and an immortal uselessness

all art thinks it’s born with, that women can’t get near.

3. I’m beloved for being art’s best worst idea. Famous for being impossible,

that’s why I’m obscene. Not because everybody wants to fuck the cup,

not even the spoon can get it up. Full frontal frottage, sapphic saucer,

a curving inside-outness, hairy leather hole. Liquid’s skill is soaking, then getting sucked.

Seed’s luck is spilling, then being tilled. It turns out we are having tea,

but it’s all so heavy with life-cycles that even when you go light, with art,

to get a little air, the room’s still a bit dark. And I’m repulsed, which attracts, in fact

the promise of warm fur is ancient, will outlast the ritual fire and water

of tea for three, not two. You see there’s me, and you, and we.

Pelts melt into a new body, not old. We’re not thirsty—we’re not cold.

4. I’m not just an object, my surfaces servicing, but I’m no more than myself.

I end at my edges, finish my points, even if I bend your senses, when I am this soft.

The spoon is small, the cup, generous, the saucer extra absorbent—

past story, beyond end, like a certain kind of woman I have been with, and been.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Tanya and other books by Brenda Shaughnessy.

Follow Brenda Shaughnessy on Twitter and Instagram @brendashaughnes.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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Today, former New Yorker poetry editor and Elizabeth Bishop scholar Alice Quinn (also the editor of our 2020 anthology of pandemic poetry) offers her pick from the Knopf backlist: a poem by Marie Ponsot (1919-2019). Alice writes: “Elements of Ponsot’s classic style–her purity of diction, her fierce and tender feeling–are abundantly on view in this poem evoking her mother, her childhood, and the journey of her spirit. A word in the poem is key, too, in an interview she gave describing the artistic discipline she established in her life of immense parental responsibility, raising seven children on her own after divorce, years in which she also taught at Queens College: ‘I wrote ten minutes a day. I did it as if it were Commandment No. 1. . . . Anyone can write a line of poetry. Try. That’s my word: try.’ ”

As Is

Objects new to this place, I receive you. It was I who sent for each of you. The house of my mother is empty. I have emptied it of all her things. The house of my mother is sold with All its trees and their usual tall music. I have sold it to the stranger, The architect with three young children.

Things of the house of my mother, You are many. My house is Poor compared to yours and hers. My poor house welcomes you. Come to rest here. Be at home. Please Do not be frantic do not Fly whistling up out of your places. You, floor- and wall-coverings, be Faithful in flatness; lie still; Try. By light or by dark There is no going back. You, crystal bowls, electrical appliances, Velvet chair and walnut chair, You know your uses; I wish you well. My mother instructed me in your behalf. I have made room for you. Most of you Knew me as a child; you can tell We need not be afraid of each other.

And you, old hopes of the house of my mother, Farewell.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Springing and other books by Marie Ponsot.

Learn about Together In a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Panemic, edited by Alice Quinn.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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In Shakespeare’s Sisters, Ramie Targoff recovers to literary memory the lives and talents of four women who wrote in England during Shakespeare’s time, well before there was any notion of “a room of one’s own.” From Mary Sidney, sister of the well-known poet Sir Philip Sidney (she wrote most of the beautiful translations of the Psalms ascribed to him) to Anne Clifford, a diarist and memoirist who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to disinherit her from her family’s land, these women stun us by their bravery. In the passage below, Targoff discusses the important poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, born of an illiterate mother and an immigrant father; it appeared in print in 1611, making her the first woman in the 17th century to publish an original book of verse.

. . .

In the same year the King James Bible first appeared in print, establishing the most influential English translation of scripture ever produced, Aemilia dared to tell a different story. Over the course of 230 rhyming stanzas of eight lines each, her “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” lays out the story of Christ’s Passion from a distinctly female perspective. The formal challenge of writing the poem was itself daunting: it’s no easy feat to compose over 1,800 lines of ottava rima (iambic pentameter stanzas written in an abababcc rhyme scheme). But Aemilia’s greater audacity was in tackling the subject of Christ’s crucifixion. To justify this, she makes the same claim for divine inspiration that the great Protestant poet John Milton would make sixty or so years later in writing Paradise Lost. Describing her own “poor barren brain” as “far too weak” for the task, she asks God to “give me power and strength to write”:

Yet if he please to illuminate my spirit,  And give me wisdom from his holy hill,  That I may write part of his glorious merit,  If he vouchsafe to guide my hand and quill Then will I tell of that sad blackfaced night,  Whose mourning Mantle covered Heavenly Light.

     Given the fact that the poem proceeds to do exactly what she petitions for, Aemilia shows her reader that her prayer has been answered: she’s not so much writing as channeling the divine word.[...]      Aemilia’s narrative of Christ’s Passion begins on the “very night our Savior was betrayed.” As part of her overall strategy in “Salve Deus”of celebrating female virtue, the poem draws attention both to the wicked acts of men (Caiaphas, Judas) and to the compassionate acts of women (the daughters of Jerusalem, the Virgin Mary) in the days leading up to Christ’s arrest. None of this comes as a surprise. But when Aemilia arrives at the moment that Pontius Pilate considers Christ’s fate, she does something totally unanticipated. Relinquishing her own role as narrator, she hands the poem over to Pilate’s wife. Among the most minor figures in the New Testament, Pilate’s wife has a single line of verse in only one of the four gospels. In Matthew 27:19, a woman who is never named urges her husband, the Roman governor in Judaea, to disregard the will of the people calling for Christ to be crucified: “Have nothing to do with that just man,” she warns Pilate, “for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.”      In early Christian commentaries and apocryphal writings, this woman was often called Procula Claudia, or simply Procula. In medieval England, Procula was paraded onstage in the mystery plays as an evil woman who almost prevented Christ’s saving humankind; in the York Cycle’s play named for her—The Dream of Pilate’s Wife—Percula, as she’s called there, receives her dream from the Devil himself. There’s no way to know if Aemilia knew this or other medieval dramas; it’s more likely she would have noticed the more positive treatment Pilate’s wife was given in the Geneva Bible, the popular translation done by English Protestants in the 1550s. Consistent with the Protestant belief that everyone should have access to the Bible directly, the translation was heavily glossed with marginal notes. Next to the verse from Matthew regarding Pilate’s wife was a single gloss suggesting that Pilate should have taken the “counsel of others to defend Christ’s innocence.” But whether the treatment of this woman was negative or positive, she had never been asked to perform the role Aemilia gave her in “Salve Deus,” where she delivers one of the strongest defenses for women’s rights that Christianity had ever seen.      In Pilate’s wife, Aemilia found her perfect heroine: a woman whose intervention at the crucial moment could have changed the course of history, if only her husband had listened. With the scriptural verse from Matthew before her, Aemilia made two crucial additions to the story. First, she transformed Pilate’s wife into a faithful believer who already regarded Christ as her Lord. “Hear the words of thy most worthy wife,” she begs her husband, “who sends to thee, to beg her Savior’s life.” Far from simply reporting that she’s had an ominous dream, as she does in Matthew, Pilate’s wife explicitly warns Pilate that he will be killing the son of God.      Second, Aemilia turned Pilate’s wife into a proto-feminist. After urging Pilate to let Christ go on religious grounds, she comes up with a new reason for why he should be pardoned: “Let not us women glory in men’s fall / Who had power given to over-rule us all.” If men are sinful enough to crucify their savior, then women should be liberated from men’s rule. “Your indiscretion sets us free,” she declares, “And makes our former fault much less appear.” In these four short lines, Aemilia’s character anticipates the killing of Christ as the basis for women’s freedom from patriarchy.      As if this weren’t radical enough, Pilate’s wife moves in “Salve Deus” from making her argument about the Crucifixion to recon- sidering the reason for Christ’s sacrifice in the first place. “Our mother Eve,” she exclaims,

. . . who tasted of the Tree Giving to Adam what she held most dear, Was simply good, and had no power to see,  The after-coming harm did not appear.

If Eve had no way to know the damage she might do, Adam was only too aware: it was he who received the command directly “from God’s mouth.” Eve was simply a victim of misinformation and “too much love,” whereas Adam, not betrayed by the “subtle Serpent’s falsehood,” knew exactly what he was doing.      Aemilia was certainly not the first person to defend Eve on grounds of her innocence or to propose that Adam be held responsible for the Fall. She was possibly the first to argue that the crime of killing Christ so overwhelmed any fault of Eve’s that women’s subordination should come to an immediate end. “If unjustly you condemn [Christ] to die,” Pilate’s wife concludes,

. . . Then let us have our Liberty again, And challenge [attribute] to your selves no Sovereignty;  You came not in the world without our pain, Make that a bar against your cruelty; Your fault being greater, why should you disdain  Our being your equals, free from tyranny? If one weak woman simply did offend,  This sin of yours, hath no excuse, nor end.

Hundreds of years before the women’s liberation movement, Aemilia used the figure of Pilate’s wife to argue that the sexes should be equal. In doing so, she also rescued a voice from history, giving full personhood and agency to a woman whom the Bible didn’t regard as worthy of a name.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Shakespeare’s Sisters by Ramie Targoff.

Browse other books by Ramie Targoff and follow her on Instagram @ramietargoff.

Hear Ramie Targoff read at the Boston Athenaeum in Boston on May 15, 6:00 - 7:00 PM. Click here to join virtually. 

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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Leila Mottley was regularly writing and performing poetry even before she published her novel Nightcrawling at only nineteen, in 2022; today we get an advance peek into her forthcoming first collection, woke up no light. Divided into hoods—sections on Girlhood, Neighborhood, Falsehood, and Womanhood—the poems instruct us, as here, in the art of noticing, speaking boldly, and feeling deeply.

what to do when you see a Black woman cry 

stop. hum a little / just for some sound / just for a way to fill us up it is streetlamp time / all moon-cheeked black girls are mourning / a wailing kind of undoing don’t mistake this as a tragedy / it is sacred don’t mistake this as a glorious pain / we hurt.

don’t tell me it will be alright. make me a gourmet meal and don’t expect me to do the dishes after don’t try to hug me without asking first if i slept last night / if i need some jasmine tea / and a bath in a tub deep enough to fit my grief

and if i say i want a hug don’t touch my hair while you do it / don’t twist my braids around your fingers or tell me my fro is matted in the back from banging my head on the wall of so many askings

you think we are sobbing for the men, but we are praying for the men / their favorite sweat-soaked t-shirts we are screeching for our thighs for our throats / and our teeth-chipping / for the terror and the ceremony / and the unending always of this sky

so if i let you see a tear drip / if i let you see my teeth chatter know you are witnessing a miracle know you are not entitled to my face crack / head shake / sob but i do not cry in front of just anyone so stop. hum a little / just for some sound / just to fill me up

More on this book and author: 

Learn more about woke up no light by Leila Mottley.

Browse other books by Leila Mottley and follow her on Instagram @leilamottley.

Click here to read Leila Mottley's curated list of recommended books about the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Leila Mottley will be in Brooklyn for a Poetry Night reading and conversation with Tatiana Johnson-Boria at Books Are Magic (Montague Street location) on April 24, 2024 at 7:00 PM. The event will also be livestreamed for free on Youtube. 

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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Martyr!, the poet Kaveh Akbar’s propulsive debut novel, tells the tale of Cyrus Shams, the son of a lost mother (victim of a 1988 U. S. Naval snafu in the Persian Gulf that killed 290 people on a commercial airliner) and the long-suffering father who emigrated to Fort Wayne, IN with his baby boy. We meet Cyrus as a student of poetry at Keady University and a reformed addict. In this excerpt, he’s at the local open mic with his friends; we also share one of the poems from Cyrus’s bookofmartyrs.docx, helpfully supplied by Akbar, the poet behind the fictional poet.

QU YUAN  340 BCE–278 BCE

you laureate of tongue and stone, among the rarer hues on the spectrum from brightest bright to darkest dark—

the villagers throwing rice into the river to lure fish from your corpse,

stutteringly radiant still, the dragon boats racing in the pink light—

no I won’t sign up for old age either, anacondas and common pearls:

of the beginning of the beginning who spoke the tale?

you did, you did

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.

Browse Kaveh Akbar's poetry collections and follow Kaveh on Instagram @kavehakbar.kavehakbar.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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Martyr!, the poet Kaveh Akbar’s propulsive debut novel, tells the tale of Cyrus Shams, the son of a lost mother (victim of a 1988 U. S. Naval snafu in the Persian Gulf that killed 290 people on a commercial airliner) and the long-suffering father who emigrated to Fort Wayne, IN with his baby boy. We meet Cyrus as a student of poetry at Keady University and a reformed addict. In this excerpt, he’s at the local open mic with his friends; we also share one of the poems from Cyrus’s bookofmartyrs.docx, helpfully supplied by Akbar, the poet behind the fictional poet.

. .

The Naples Tuesday night open mic had become a mainstay of Cyrus and Zee’s friendship. It was a small affair, not much to distinguish it from the myriad other open mics happening elsewhere in the country—except this was their open mic, their organic community of beautiful weirdos—old hippies singing Pete Seeger, trans kids rapping about liberation, passionate spoken-word performances by nurses and teenagers and teachers and cooks. As with any campus open mic, there was the occasional frat dude coming to play sets of smirky acoustic rap covers and overearnest breakup narratives. But even they were welcome, and mostly it felt like a safe little oasis of amongness in the relative desert of their Indiana college town, a healthy way to spend the time they were no longer using to get drunk or high.   Naturally, Naples didn’t have its own sound equipment, so Zee would usually show up fifteen minutes early with his beat-up Yamaha PA to set up for Sad James, who hosted every week. Sad James was called this to distinguish him from DJ James, a guy who cycled nightly through the campus bars. DJ James was not a particularly interesting artist, but he was well-known enough in the campus community to warrant Sad James’s nominative prefix, which began as a joke but somehow stuck, and to which Sad James had grown accustomed with good humor, even occasionally doing small shows under the name. Sad James was a quiet white guy, long blond hair framing his lightly stubbled face, who played intensely solemn electronic songs, punctuated by sparse circuit-bent blips and bloops, and over time at Keady, he had become one of Zee and Cyrus’s most resilient and trusted friends.   On this night, Cyrus had read a poem early, an older experimental piece from a series where he’d been assigning words to each digit 0–9, then using an Excel document to generate a lyric out of those words as the digits appeared in the Fibonacci sequence: “lips sweat teeth lips spread teeth lips drip deep deep sweat skin,” etc. It was bad, but he loved reading them out loud, the rhythms and repeti­tions and weird little riffs that emerged. Sad James did an older piece where the lyrics “burning with the human stain / she dries up, dust in the rain” were repeated and modulated over molten beeps from an old circuit-bent Game Boy. Zee—a drummer in his free time who idolized J Dilla and John Bonham and Max Roach and Zach Hill in equal measure—hadn’t brought anything of his own to perform that evening, but did have a little bongo to help accompany any acoustic acts who wanted it.   On the patio listening to Cyrus talk about his new project, Zee said, “I could see it being a bunch of different poems in the voices of all your different historical martyr obsessions?” Then to Sad James, Zee added, “Cyrus has been plastering our apartment with these big black-and-white printouts of all their terrifying faces. Bobby Sands in our kitchen, Joan of Arc in our hallway.”   Sad James made his eyes get big.   “I just like having them present,” Cyrus said, slumping into his chair. He didn’t add that he’d been reading about them in the library, his mystic martyrs, that he’d taped a great grid of their grayscale printed faces above his bed, half believing it would work like those tapes that promised to teach you Spanish while you slept, that some­how their lived wisdoms would pass into him as he dreamt. Among the Tank Man, Bobby Sands, Falconetti as Joan of Arc, Cyrus had a picture of his parents’ wedding day. His mother, seated in a sleeved white dress, smiling tightly at the camera while his father, in a tacky gray tux, sat grinning next to her holding her hand. Above their heads, a group of attendees held an ornate white sheet. It was the only picture of his mother he had. Next to his mother, his father beamed, bright in a way that made it seem he was radiating the light himself.   Zee went on: “So you could write a poem where Joan of Arc is like, ‘Wow, this fire is so hot’ or whatever. And then a poem where Hussain is like, ‘Wow, sucks that I wouldn’t kneel.’ You know what I mean?”   Cyrus laughed.   “I tried some of that! But see, that’s where it gets corny. What could I possibly say about the martyrdom of Hussain or Joan of Arc or whoever that hasn’t already been said? Or that’s worth saying?”   Sad James asked who Hussain was and Zee quickly explained the trial in the desert, Hussain’s refusing to kneel and being killed for it.   “You know, Hussain’s head is supposedly still buried in Cairo?” Zee said, smiling. “Cairo, which is in which country again?”   Cyrus rolled his eyes at his friend, who was, as Cyrus liked to remind him when he got too greatest-ancient-civilization-on-earth about things, only half Egyptian.   “Damn,” Sad James said. “I would’ve just kneeled and crossed my fingers behind my back. Who am I trying to impress? Later I could call take-backsies. I’d just say I tripped and landed on my knees or something.”   The three friends laughed. Justine, an open mic regular whose Blonde on Blonde–era pea-coat-and-harmonica-rack Bob Dylan act was a mainstay of the open mic, came outside to ask Zee for a cigarette. He obliged her with an American Spirit Yellow, which she lit around the corner as she began speaking into her cell phone.   In moments like these Cyrus still sometimes felt like asking to bum one too—he’d been a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker before he got sober, and continued his habit even after he’d kicked everything else. “Quit things in the order they’re killing you,” his sponsor, Gabe, told him once. After a year clean he turned his attention to cigarettes, which he finally managed to kick completely by tapering: from one and a half packs a day to a pack to half a pack to five cigarettes and so on until he was just smoking a single cigarette every few days and then, none at all. He could probably get away with bumming the occasional cigarette now and again, but in his mind he was saving that for something momentous: his final moments lying in the grass dying from a gunshot wound, or walking in slow motion away from a burning building.   “So what are you thinking then? A novel? Or like . . . a poetic mar­tyr field guide?” asked Zee.   “I’m really not sure yet. But my whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accom­modate her. That’s what I’m after.”

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.

Browse Kaveh Akbar's poetry collections and follow Kaveh on Instagram @kavehakbar.kavehakbar.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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[aaknopf]

Understanding the imprint of her mother on her body and soul has been one of the encompassing projects of the poetry of Sharon Olds. Over the years, her poems have explored the child’s desire to protect itself from harm, as well as the grown daughter’s imperative to tell the truth about the mothering she received and, into her later age, to try to forgive.

Tender Bitter

When I started having tender thoughts about myself as a child—that long, pointed chin, those tiny eyes—I started having tender thoughts of my mother. She would look up, a lot—short for an adult— with a look of dazed longing, her fine straight hair wrapped wet around many small rollers, and bound back with combs put in backward, to give her hair some height, or with a fillet like a goddess. My hair was loopy, soft, lollopy like flop-eared rabbits’ ears, she wrote about it in my Baby Book, “Shar’s not conventionally beautiful—but that naturally curly hair!” I don’t think she would have traded with me, she remembered her cold Pilgrim mother, in my mom’s sleep, slipping the bobby-pins out of the dreaming child’s spit curls. We were big on trading—you were supposed to want to take Jesus’s place on the cross, as he had taken yours. I think my mother would have died for me— and I think I would have died for her— is that how the other animals do it? Who dies for whom? My mom sometimes liked my mind—the odd things I said—she would write about my mind in my pink Baby Book. She came from ignorant educated people of self-importance and leisure. She did not see that what I said was funny, like joking, it was metaphor. But it charmed her. She would not have taken it from me, she would not have known what to do with it, nor did she want to mar me, as her mother had marred her. My mother . . . loved me. If she had not beaten me, I would have been purely enamored with her—she was so sad, and pretty. Her eyes were a hundred bright bright blues, like a butterfly’s scales but crystal electric, like a shattered turquoise goblet. She did not take away my ability to love—with her elder sister, and my elder sister, she taught it to me. And she did not take my mind—the one thing of value I was born with—my mother did not take the simile away from me.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Balladz by Sharon Olds.

Browse other books by Sharon Olds.

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[aaknopf]

Tomás Q. Morín, author of the recent collection Machete, chose a poem by a Knopf ancestor for today. His pick is this four-liner by Jack Gilbert (1925-2012), from the award-winning collection Refusing Heaven. Tomás writes, “I've carried a handwritten copy of this poem, given to me by a friend, in my wallet for probably close to ten years. Wallets have come and gone, but the mysterious nostalgia (or is it nostalgic mystery?) and the hope threaded through this poem remain fresh. Each time I read it, I smile. There's not much praise I can give better than that.”

The Reinvention of Happiness

I remember how I’d lie on my roof listening to the fat violinist below in the sleeping village play Schubert so badly, so well

More on these books & authors

Learn more about Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert and Machete by Tomás Q. Morín and read his latest nonfiction book, Where Are You From: Letters to My Son.

Browse other books by Jack Gilbert and Tomás Q. Morín and follow Tomás on Instagram @tomasqmorin.

Read "Stunt Double," one of Tomás Q. Morín's latest poems from his forthcoming collection My Favorite Things.

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[aaknopf]

The novelist Michael Ondaatje has been a poet from the beginning. “Lock,” like other poems in new collection A Year of Last Things, speaks swiftly across time, striking at poetry’s core, where a singular memory flares in the dark and illuminates everything.

Lock

Reading the lines he loves he slips them into a pocket, wishes to die with his clothes full of torn-free stanzas and the telephone numbers of his children in far cities

As if these were all we need and want, not the dog or silver bowl not the brag of career or ownership

Unless they can be used —a bowl to beg with, a howl to scent a friend, as those torn lines remind us how to recall

until we reach that horizon and drop, or rise like a canoe within a lock to search the other half of the river,

where you might see your friends as altered by this altitude as you

The fresh summer grass, the smell of the view— dark water, August paint

How I loved that lock when I saw it all those summers ago,                         when we arrived out of a storm into its evening light,

and gave a stranger some wine in a tin cup

Even then I wanted to slip into the wet dark rectangle and swim on barefoot to other depths where nothing could be seen that was a further story

More on this book and author:

Learn more about A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje.

Browse other books by Michael Ondaatje.

Hear Michael Ondaatje read at the Chicago Humanities Spring Festival on Saturday, April 13. Michael will be in California and will read at Green Apple Books in San Francisco on April 15 at 7:00 PM (register here), Dominican University of California in San Rafael on April 17 at 7:00 PM (register here), and Copperfield Books in Petaluma on April 18 at 7:00 PM (register here).

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A poem of girlhood and after by Indigenous New Zealander Tayi Tibble, whose second collection, Rangikura, comes out in America today. In the dictionary of Māori language, hōmiromiro is defined as “a white-breasted North Island tomtit…a little black-and-white bird with a large head and short tail.” It is often used to refer to someone with a tomtit’s keen vision—that is, a sharp eye for detail.

Hōmiromiro

I used to dream about a two-headed goldfish. I took it for an omen. I smashed a milk bottle open

on a boiling road and watched a three-legged dog lick it up and in the process I became not myself but a single shard of glass and thought finally

I had starved myself skinny enough to slip into the splits of the universe but once I did I realised that the universe was no place for a young thing to be and there is always a lot more starving to be had.

When I was a girl I thought

I was Daisy Buchanan. I read on the train. I made voluminous eyes.

Once I walked in front of a bus and it exploded into a million monarch butterflies then I was ecstatic!

As a girl, I could only fathom

time as rose petals falling down my oesophagus. It tickled and it frightened me. I ran around choking for attention.

I had projections of myself at 100 my neck weathered and adorned like the boards of a home being eaten by the earth.

When I was a girl I would lie

on the side of that road in the last lick of sun and wait for the rabbits to come saluting the sky of orange dust

and then I would shoot them into outer space.

For many years I watched them bouncing on the moon. But then I stopped caring and so I stopped looking.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Rangikura by Tayi Tibble.

Browse other books by Tayi Tibble and follow her on Instagram @paniaofthekeef.

Hear Tayi Tibble and Harryette Mullen read from their new poetry collections at Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, CA on April 10 at 8:00 PM. Tayi Tibble will be joined by Sasha LaPointe in Washington for a series of readings and conversations at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle on April 13 at 7:00 PM, at King's Books in Tacoma on April 14 at 1:00 PM, at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in Bainbridge on April 15 at 7:00 PM, and at Third Place Books in Seattle, Lake Forest Park, on April 16 at 7:00 PM. Tayi and Sasha will also be at Broadway Books in Portland, OR, on April 17 at 6:00 PM. Tayi will be at the LA Times Book Festival signing books at the ALTA booth (Booth 111) on April 20 at 11:00 AM.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.