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April 30, 2025: Dead Stars, Ada Limón

Dead Stars Ada Limón

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.                  Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us. Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out        the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue        recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,        Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full        of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward        what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.        We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.      No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,                  if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

--

Alas, all of this is over, too -- our month of poetry. Once again, thanks for being into it and I hope you enjoyed the ride. 

Any kinds of poems/poets you'd like to see more of next year?

To tide you over for the next 11 months, you can check out work by all past poets, poems with specific topics, formats, or vibes, or just get treated to a random infusion of Vitamin Poetry.

Today in:  2024: A Valentine for Ernest Mann, Naomi Shihab Nye 2023: Oral History of Insatiability, Jason Myers 2022: Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Adam Zagajewski 2021: In Defense of a Long Engagement, Mairead Small Staid 2020: Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness, Mary Oliver 2019: Starlings in Winter, Mary Oliver 2018: Born Yesterday, Philip Larkin 2017: Thus, He Spoke His Quietus, Thomas Lux 2016: Trees, W.S. Merwin 2015: Today and Two Thousand Years from Now, Philip Levine 2014: from For a Long Time I Have Wanted to Write a Happy Poem, Richard Jackson 2013: Tear It Down, Jack Gilbert 2012: from An Atlas of the Difficult World, Adrienne Rich 2011: Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal, Naomi Shihab Nye 2010: from Pioneers! O Pioneers!, Walt Whitman 2009: from The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot 2008: from Five-Finger Exercises, T.S. Eliot 2007: Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot 2006: Preludes, T.S. Eliot 2005: A Song for Simeon, T.S. Eliot

xo, Martha

[april-is]

April 29, 2025: Greensickness, Laurel Chen

Greensickness Laurel Chen

after Gwendolyn Brooks

My wild grief didn’t know where to end. Everywhere I looked: a field alive and unburied. Whole swaths of green swallowed the light. All around me, the field was growing. I grew out My hair in every direction. Let the sun freckle my face. Even in the greenest depths, I crouched Towards the light. That summer, everything grew So alive and so alone. A world hushed in green. Wildest grief grew inside out.

I crawled to the field’s edge, bruises blooming In every crevice of my palms. I didn’t know I’d reached a shoreline till I felt it There: A salt wind lifted The hair from my neck. At the edge of every green lies an ocean. When I saw that blue, I knew then: This world will end.

Grief is not the only geography I know. Every wound closes. Repair comes with sweetness, Come spring. Every empire will fall: I must believe this. I felt it Somewhere in the field: my ancestors Murmuring Go home, go home—soon, soon. No country wants me back anymore and I’m okay.

If grief is love with nowhere to go, then Oh, I’ve loved so immensely. That summer, everything I touched Was green. All bruises will fade From green and blue to skin. Let me grow through this green And not drown in it. Let me be lawless and beloved, Ungovernable and unafraid. Let me be brave enough to live here. Let me be precise in my actions. Let me feel hurt. I know I can heal. Let me try again—again and again.

--

From the author: "This poem was inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem 'To the Young Who Want to Die,’ which ends with the lines, ‘Graves grow no green that you can use. / Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.’ This poem articulates my belief that grief isn’t a dead thing; it’s very much alive and continues to shape how I grow and live in this world. This poem says: healing is forever, another world is possible, and no nation will protect us, only we will."

Today in: 2024: from Gaza, Summer 2006, Jasmine Donahaye 2023: June, Alex Dimitrov 2022: Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be, Ross Gay 2021: Choi Jeong Min, Franny Choi 2020: Earl, Louis Jenkins 2019: Kul, Fatimah Asghar 2018: My Life Was the Size of My Life, Jane Hirshfield 2017: I Would Ask You To Reconsider The Idea That Things Are As Bad As They’ve Ever Been, Hanif Abdurraqib 2016: Tired, Langston Hughes 2015: Democracy, Langston Hughes 2014: Postscript, Seamus Heaney 2013: The Ghost of Frank O’Hara, John Yohe 2012: All Objects Reveal Something About the Body, Catie Rosemurgy 2011: Prayer, Marie Howe 2010: The Talker, Chelsea Rathburn 2009: There Are Many Theories About What Happened, John Gallagher 2008: bon bon il est un pays, Samuel Beckett 2007: Root root root for the home team, Bob Hicok 2006: Fever 103°, Sylvia Plath 2005: King Lear Considers What He’s Wrought, Melissa Kirsch

[april-is]

April 28, 2025: Connor Everywhere But, Adam Falkner

Connor Everywhere But Adam Falkner

after Jericho Brown Connor on the four train, sports page rolled           into a drumstick.  Connor stretched out shirtless on the front lawn, a football propped           behind his head.  Connor laughing against the red brick of a café, head thrown to the sky           like a sail snapped by the song of a quick wind.  Connor in The Daily News: a balcony           mishap, twenty-four flights, faulty railing.

Connor through the bottom of a pint glass.           Connor through the crowd at West Fourth, a fistful of fence in each hand.  Connor through           the bottom of a whiskey glass.  Connor hobbling on a kickstand crutch, swinging           at stray frisbees, tree trunks.  Connor on Channel 7: a good-hearted young man, filled           with hope, always whistling. Connor drunk-leaning toward a woman at the bar, whispering           a smile of green lights across her face. Connor in black and white, frozen on a bookshelf.           Connor in the tire-gravel high note of a blues ballad, the scratch of careless stubble on another man’s           neck.  Connor collected cleanly into a shoebox.

Connor in the search bar.  Connor on G-Chat:           Invisible.  Connor floating in the corner of a cooler, tucked behind the last Newcastle.           Connor circling in a breeze above the Neversink, curling around the Hemlocks like smoke           in a dead room.  Connor in a porcelain vase on a mantle.  Connor in poems that have nothing           to do with Connor.  Connor sitting shotgun in the silent 4Runner on the way to his own funeral,           bare feet propped on the dash. Connor between eye-rubs on the couch before dawn,           flashing in and out like an old time movie, shower water running in the next room.

--

Also by Adam Falkner: Origin Story, 1993

Today in:  2024: The Mother’s Loathing of Balloons, A.E. Stallings 2023: To Be Alive, Gregory Orr 2022: A Metaphor, J. Estanislao Lopez 2021: Ode to the Unbroken World, Which Is Coming, Thomas Lux 2020: What Kind of Times Are These, Adrienne Rich 2019: Conversation with Phillis Wheatley #2, Tiana Clark 2018: Love Poem, Denise Levertov 2017: Young Wife’s Lament, Brigit Pegeen Kelly 2016: For the Confederate Dead, Kevin Young 2015: Awaking in New York, Maya Angelou 2014: when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story, Gwendolyn Brooks 2013: Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, Hayden Carruth 2012: My Place, Franz Wright 2011: from The Wild Geese, Wendell Berry 2010: Love After Love, Derek Walcott 2009: To This May, W.S. Merwin 2008: Father, Ted Kooser 2007: from Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight, Galway Kinnell 2006: Crusoe in England, Elizabeth Bishop 2005: Dream Song 1, John Berryman

[april-is]

April 27, 2025: De'an, Heid E. Erdrich

De'an Heid E. Erdrich

Dogs so long with us we forget that wolves allowed as how they might be tamed and sprang up all over the globe, with all humans, all at once, like a good idea. So we tamed our own hearts. Leashed them or sent them to camp’s edge. Even the shrinks once agreed, in dreams our dogs are our deepest selves. Ur Dog, a Siberian, dogged the heels of nomads, then turned south to Egypt to keep Pharaoh safe. Seemed strange, my mother sighed, when finally we got a hound, . . . a house without a dog. Her world never knew a yard un-dogged and thus unlocked. Sudden intrusions impossible where yappers yap. Or maybe she objected to empty armchairs, rooms too quiet without the beat of tail thump or paw thud. N’de, Ojibwe say, my pet, which also suggests ode, that spot in the chest, the part you point to when you pray, or say with great feeling—great meaning, meaning dog-love goes that deep.

-- More poems from indigenous poets.

More dog poems:  + A Small, Soul-Colored Thing, Paisley Rekdal + Dog in Bed, Joyce Sidman + Snow, Aldo, Kate DiCamillo

Today in: 2024: Witness, Crystal Wilkinson 2023: from Burial, Ross Gay 2022: Ode to Tortillas, José Olivarez 2021: Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry, Jericho Brown 2020: The Restoration, Gary Jackson 2019: The Termite, Ogden Nash 2018: Elegy, W.S. Merwin 2017: Young Wife’s Lament, Brigit Pegeen Kelly 2016: For the Confederate Dead, Kevin Young 2015: Awaking in New York, Maya Angelou 2014: when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story, Gwendolyn Brooks 2013: Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, Hayden Carruth 2012: My Place, Franz Wright 2011: from The Wild Geese, Wendell Berry 2010: Love After Love, Derek Walcott 2009: To This May, W.S. Merwin 2008: Father, Ted Kooser 2007: from Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight, Galway Kinnell 2006: Crusoe in England, Elizabeth Bishop 2005: Dream Song 1, John Berryman

[april-is]

April 26, 2025: Butter, Olive Oil, Flour, Lucia Cherciu

Butter, Olive Oil, Flour Lucia Cherciu

Even the grocery list is a love poem, a prayer— God, let me keep what I love.

Peaches, cheap. Books, brilliant— mine so I can underline.

How aromatic the apricots, how sharp the novels.

Together, we have planted an orchard.

I don’t understand the word defensive: are you supposed to just sit there?

I don’t think we have this word in Romanian; we also don’t have a word for camel toe.

Or panty line: if you don’t see one does it mean you’re going commando?

You always put a spell on me. And everything I want is here—

but where am I?

--

Today in: 

2024: Origin Story, 1993, Adam Falkner 2023: For the Dogs Who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut, Hanif Abdurraqib 2022: Demeter, Midwinter, Mairead Small Staid 2021: from A Pillow Book, Suzanne Buffam 2020: Letter to My Great, Great Grandchild, J.P. Grasser 2019: After the First Child, the Second, Mary Austin Speaker 2018: A New Lifestyle, James Tate 2017: Anchorage, Joy Harjo 2016: Poem to First Love, Matthew Yeager 2015: Ode to the Reel Mower, Jim Daniels 2014: So Much Happiness, Naomi Shihab Nye 2013: Habitation, Margaret Atwood 2012: About Marriage, Denise Levertov 2011: In Praise of My Bed, Meredith Holmes 2010: Black Swan, Brigit Pegeen Kelly 2009: In Me as the Swans, Leslie Williams 2008: Gnosticism V, Anne Carson 2007: American Names, Stephen Vincent Benet 2006: since feeling is first, e.e. cummings 2005: The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats

[april-is]

April 25, 2025: a remix for remembrance, Kristiana Rae Colón

a remix for remembrance Kristiana Rae Colón

For my students

This is for the boys whose bedrooms are in the basement, who press creases into jeans, who carve their names in pavement, the girls whose names are ancient, ancestry is sacred, the Aztec and the Mayan gods abuela used to pray with

This is for the dangerous words hiding in the pages of composition notes, holy books, and Sanskrit This is for the patients who wait for medication, for the mothers microwaving beans and rice at day’s end

This is for the marching bands and girls at quinceañeras, the skaters and the writers whose moms are eloteras, laughing “Cops don’t scare us, we sag so elders fear us We will rewrite our textbooks in our own language if you dare us”

This is for the Sarahs, the Angelicas, and Shawns, the Beatrices, Paolas, Danielas, and the dawns we scribble sunlight in the margins of horizons with our songs, for all the voices tangled with the silence on our tongues

Rivals in the parks, fireworks at dark, tired shirts that sweat your scent on hangers in the closet For the boys who fix the faucet while their sister fixes coffee ’cause mommy had to leave for work at 6 AM and laundry isn’t folded yet: you don’t have to hold your breath

You don’t have to behave: stage your own rebellion, paint canvases with rage and religion and prayers for pilgrims sleeping in the train cars at the border and their children Filibust the Senate and bust markers on the Pink Line, stain the prosecution’s case and force the judge to resign, force the crowd the rewind the lyrics you invented

Speak away the limits to heights of your existence Be a witness, be a record, be a testament, a triumph Set your poems flying in the glitter of the planets Feed open mouths with truth, the truth is we are famished The Universe is starving for the symphonies you play Clarinets and thunder and the syllables you say are the instruments: you are infinite. Stretch your hands to heaven Let your throat throttle the rhythms of all your fallen brethren Your legacy is present, your history is now You are the tenth degree of sound You are the nephews of the sky You are the bass line and the hi-hat and the snare drum and the cry of red Septembers. You’re the architects of winter You are the builders of the roads that you’re told you don’t       remember          You are       the builders of the roads       that you’re told       you don’t remember       You are the builders            of the roads that you’re told you don’t            remember

Cast poems in the river and tell them you remember Skate City Hall to splinters and tell them you remember Send diamonds to your islands and tell them you remember Find your God inside your mirror and tell Her you remember

--

I think rhyming poetry can often feel old fashioned -- yet this is anything but. I love how even when the rhymes disappear from the ends of each line, you can still find rhymes and almost-rhymes (slant rhymes!) buried throughout the stanza: parks/dark, closet/faucet. And it helps keep up the relentless, self-assured rhythm of the whole poem, rushing ahead and building.

More Latinx poets here.

Today in: 2024: from Moon for Aisha, Aracelis Girmay 2023: Still Life with Nursing Bra, Keetje Kuipers 2022: A Small-Sized Mystery, Jane Hirshfield 2021: Prayer for My Unborn Niece or Nephew, Ross Gay 2020: Vigil, Phillis Levin 2019: Nights in the Neighborhood, Linda Gregg 2018: I Dreamed Again, Anne Michaels 2017: wishes for sons, Lucille Clifton 2016: Told You So, Keetje Kuipers 2015: Accident, Mass. Ave., Jill McDonough 2014: This Hour and What Is Dead, Li-Young Lee 2013: To Myself, Franz Wright 2012: Manet’s Olympia, Margaret Atwood 2011: Three Rivers, Alpay Ulku 2010: Ode to Hangover, Dean Young 2009: We become new, Marge Piercy 2008: The Only Animal, Franz Wright 2007: Dream Song 385, John Berryman 2006: The Quiet World, Jeffrey McDaniel 2005: Man and Wife, Robert Lowell

[april-is]

April 24, 2025: American Sonnet for the New Year, Terrance Hayes

American Sonnet for the New Year Terrance Hayes

things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly things got ugly embarrassingly quickly actually things got ugly unbelievably quickly honestly things got ugly seemingly infrequently initially things got ugly ironically usually awfully carefully things got ugly unsuccessfully occasionally things got ugly mostly painstakingly quietly seemingly things got ugly beautifully infrequently things got ugly sadly especially frequently unfortunately things got ugly increasingly obviously things got ugly suddenly embarrassingly forcefully things got really ugly regularly truly quickly things got really incredibly ugly things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully

--

Also by Terrance Hayes:  + Serenade + New York Poem

Today in:  2024: How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This, Hanif Abdurraqib 2023: Lit, Andrea Cohen 2022: Meditations in an Emergency, Cameron Awkward-Rich 2021: How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River, Barbara Crooker 2020: Ash, Tracy K. Smith 2019: Under Stars, Dorianne Laux 2018: Afterlife, Natalie Eilbert 2017: There Are Birds Here, Jamaal May 2016: Poetry, Richard Kenney 2015: Dreaming at the Ballet, Jack Gilbert 2014: Vocation, Sandra Beasley 2013: Near the Race Track, Brigit Pegeen Kelly 2012: from Ask Him, Raymond Carver 2011: Sweet Star Chisel, Dearest Flaming Crumbs in Your Beard Lord, John Rybicki 2010: Rain Travel, W.S. Merwin 2009: Goodnight, Li-Young Lee 2008: Bearhug, Michael Ondaatje 2007: Meditation at Lagunitas, Robert Hass 2006: Autumn, Rainer Maria Rilke 2005: On Turning Ten, Billy Collins

[april-is]

April 23, 2025: Staircase, Adam Gianforcaro

Staircase Adam Gianforcaro

I trip on the title, clumsy as I am, and topple down the first few lines. Dorton calls it getting dropkicked into a poem, some secondary speaker forcing the other over the edge, but this was a mess of my own making, the mind meandering as it does, dispatching enjambments where they don’t be- long. And now there’s a figure tumbling forth, their bony parts smacking the serifed lips of line breaks and yellow pine. It is not until they reach the carpet-soft landing that the world above comes back into focus—kids’ toys in the hallway, a blue bird that found its way indoors. But now that we’re here together, it’s easy to see why gravity constantly pulls us to the final line: it is where the writer and reader can link hands, link breath, and if done correctly, purposefully, will become a platform from which to ascend in unison.

--

Today in:  2024: Available Now: Archaic Torsos of Both Sexes, Gregory Orr 2023: Search Patrols, Ilya Kaminsky 2022: The Problem with Travel, Ada Limón 2021: When I Say That Loving Me Is Kind Of Like Being A Chicago Bulls Fan, Hanif Abdurraqib 2020:from Children Walk on Chairs to Cross a Flooded Schoolyard, Patrick Rosal 2019: If Life Is As Short As Our Ancestors Insist It Is, Why Isn’t Everything I Want Already At My Feet, Hanif Abdurraqib 2018: Bliss and Grief, Marie Ponsot 2017: Verge, Mark Doty 2016: Ever, Meghan O’Rourke 2015: The Two Times I Loved You the Most In a Car, Dorothea Grossman2014: May Day, Phillis Levin 2013: The Triumph of the Infinite, Mark Strand 2012: Mermaid Song, Kim Addonizio 2011: the laughing heart, Charles Bukowski 2010: from Jenny, Genya Turovskaya 2009: A Step Away From Them, Frank O’Hara 2008: Entry, Lisa Sewell 2007: Meanwhile, Richard Siken 2006: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Amiri Baraka 2005: Holy Sonnet XIV, John Donne

[april-is]

April 22, 2025: Meanwhile the Watermelon Seed, Idra Novey

Meanwhile the Watermelon Seed Idra Novey

On Tuesday, new prisoners arrive.

In late fall, when leaves clog the gutters and their last colors go out like stars, new prisoners arrive.

As another plane pitches upward and a red finch drops for landing.

As fleets of schoolchildren go forth in pursuit of green candy.

At three a.m., when dogs shift position on the bed and stir their owners who look out and find it’s snowing.

In the hour when I call my sister and she empties the dishwasher, new prisoners arrive.

In the hour when drivers click on their headlights and flowers close and fireflies get trapped in jars.

On the evening when I see no one, read nothing, and somehow the hours are gone.

In the sweltering city, where a friend brings a watermelon and we spit its seeds onto the roof of the museum next door and the world seems repairable and temporarily right, new prisoners line up outside a pair of doors, enter one at a time.

--

(Check it out: You can now browse a list of every poet ever featured here, linked to their poems. Find old favs and new! Ignore the rumors, I certainly didn't spend far too long in a satisfying state of hyperfocus making it.)

Today in: 

2024: Kinder Than Man, Althea Davis 2023: Dearest,, Jean Valentine 2022: Birth, Louise Erdrich 2021: Cicada, Hosho McCreesh 2020: Future Memories, Mario Meléndez 2019: Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman, Anne Sexton 2018: First Night, D. Nurkse 2017: Einstein’s Happiest Moment, Richard M. Berlin 2016: Yiddishland, Erika Meitner 2015: July, Kazim Ali 2014: This Morning in a Morning Voice, Todd Boss 2013: Paralysis, Peter Boyle 2012: from Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara 2011: Northern Pike, James Wright 2010: Humpbacks, Mary Oliver 2009: Alone, Jack Gilbert 2008: From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee 2007: For Grace, After A Party, Frank O’Hara 2006: Wild Geese, Mary Oliver 2005: A Brief for the Defense, Jack Gilbert

[april-is]

April 21, 2025: An Improvement in Stairs, Mairead Small Staid

An Improvement in Stairs Mairead Small Staid

Through the oculus of the bus terminal at Boston’s South Station, light falls for a hundred feet. A shock, a god, a pillar of light, like that of the Pantheon

if the Pantheon had a McDonald’s, a Dunkin’ Donuts, surly young workers at the Greyhound desk, & an escalator rising to its height—

just like it, that light. A patent for an early escalator called it an improvement in stairs. An improvement, surely, how I’m standing still & still, somehow,

going up & up & up. My favorite patents are the ones Houdini sought for tricks never performed: a block of ice he would leave whole, a box within a water-filled box

he would escape from dry. (I should mention: at least one thing in this poem is a lie.) I can disappear, too: from one place, from another. There’s nothing quite as nice

as leaving, when you’re in the mood. There’s nothing quite as nice as coming back. Years ago, I stood beneath the Pantheon & thought how beautiful, how sublime,

how like the bus terminal at South Station, if it had a Dunkin’ Donuts. During the war, Houdini offered to teach soldiers headed to the front

how to escape torpedoed vessels, German handcuffs. As a kid in Appleton, Wisconsin, he’d dreamed of playing baseball—

the stage of the stadium, the long fly making its escape. The way there is a place in the game called home

& the goal is to get there again & again.

--

Also by Mairead Small Staid (hi! <3):  + In Defense of a Long Engagement + Demeter, Midwinter

More poems about Boston and baseball.

Today in:  2024: April Morning, Jonathan Wells 2023: What I Did Wrong, Marie Howe 2022: This Morning, Jay Wright 2021: Kiss of the Sun, Mary Ruefle 2020: Teaching English from an Old Composition Book, Gary Soto 2019: Easter, Jill Alexander Essbaum 2018: Annunciation, Marie Howe 2017: The Promise, Marie Howe 2016: In the Woods, Kathryn Simmonds 2015: Heat, Jane Hirshfield 2014: What Remains, Ellery Akers 2013: 30th Birthday, Alice Notley 2012: Untitled [I closed the book and changed my life], Bruce Smith 2011: The Forties, Franz Wright 2010: Prayer of the Backhanded, Jericho Brown 2009: A Primer, Bob Hicok 2008: Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry, Howard Nemerov 2007: Open Letter to the Muse, Kristy Bowen 2006: A Sad Child, Margaret Atwood 2005: The Crunch, Charles Bukowski

[april-is]

April 20, 2025: Poem in the Shape of the Poet Beating Henry Kissinger to Death with Their Bare Hands, Felix Lecocq

Poem in the Shape of the Poet Beating Henry Kissinger to Death with Their Bare Hands Felix Lecocq

--

(Today's poem is shared as an image, and includes a transcription of the poem as alt text. If you're unable to see it, you can also find it transcribed below.)

US-funded projects addressing the ongoing impact of Agent Orange in Viet Nam (toxin cleanup, support for those with congenital disorders like the poet's) were disrupted by the abrupt dismantling of US foreign aid programming this year. Along with many others.

Today in: 2024: blessing the boats, Lucille Clifton 2023: Wound is the Origin of Wonder, Maya C. Popa 2022: When the Fox Comes to the City, Patricia Fargnoli 2021: aubade for the whole hood, Nate Marshall 2020: Keeping Things Whole, Mark Strand 2019: New Year’s Day, Kim Addonizio 2018: I Know You Think I’ve Forgotten, Jane Hirshfield 2017: The Writer, Richard Wilbur 2016: from Seven Skins, Adrienne Rich 2015: I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life, Mary Oliver 2014: In the Park, Maxine Kumin 2013: To A Sad Daughter, Michael Ondaatje 2012: My Dead Friends, Marie Howe 2011: Staying After, Linda Gregg 2010: Dream Song 14, John Berryman 2009: What We Kept, Megan Alpert 2008: Please Take Back the Sparrows, Suzanne Buffam 2007: It Happens Like This, James Tate 2006: Tantalus in May, Reginald Shepherd 2005: September Song, Geoffrey Hill

A transcript of the poem text follows:

Text is in the shape of a standing person raising a fist in order to punch someone who is lying on the ground holding up their hands in defense. It reads:

hooking up with strange men on edibles is fucking awesome until you’re lying in his bed afterward and you can’t shut up about how much you want to hit henry kissinger over and over until he stops breathing. like, did you know that agent orange is apparently 100,000 times more potent than thalidomide at causing birth defects and to this day vietnamese infants have an elevated incidence of congenital disorders, including heart abnormalities, and like you’re not saying that henry kissinger is the reason you were born with a broken heart but wouldn’t it be so fucked up if he was and wouldn’t you then have every right to press your thumbs into his windpipe until he chokes to death and your hookup is like yeah you’re right that would be fucked up i’m sorry but what did you want to get i’m placing the order now and you say two spicy potato soft tacos please and you let him pay for it because he’s white and you’re too stoned to navigate venmo right now and it’s only like $2 but by the time the food arrives you’ve fallen asleep anyway, hand over your heart monitor, dreaming of kissinger’s blood dribbling out his mouth like hot sauce

[april-is]

April 19, 2025: spring, Safia Elhillo

spring Safia Elhillo

      After Louise Glück it’s late now, it’s early, no way to know which season it is of the total years of my life, weren’t we only just nineteen, tonya & i, wasn’t she only just alive, long-limbed & cross-legged on my dorm room floor, wasn’t it springtime of a year so unlike this one, thirteen years past, cool nights in line outside the nuyorican hoping to make it on the list, wasn’t it a friday night like this one & the only people i wanted to love were poets, earrings swaying against their necks, dancing in the dark of the room where we all knew each other’s secrets, weren’t we all just at that party, wasn’t i only just eighteen, pointed northward on a chinatown bus to that city, to watch ai elo onstage at the apollo, wasn’t she only just alive, smoking with camonghne, asking me my favorite song, cackling on the apartment floor, on the air mattress we used as a couch, how is it that it was long ago, how is it i am on the other side of it, long ago, how did i leave that city, that time when we were all together, everyone alive, wasn’t the dream to be a poet, wasn’t the plan to live forever, our powers newly acquired, newly in love with what we could do, didn’t we all belong to each other, to that work, going after to the pizza shop to recite what we’d memorized, weren’t we all just there, wasn’t it warm outside, wasn’t the road long & clear, isn’t it early still, isn’t it late, & why am i still here, did i survive or was i left behind, & what season is it that we are no longer together & some of us have gone?

--

Hear the author read this.

Also by Safia Elhillo:  + For My Friends, in Reply to a Question + vocabulary

Today in: 

2024: Dear Proofreader, David Hernandez 2023: The Socks, Jane Kenyon 2022: Ode to Friendship, Noor Hindi 2021: Heartbeats, Melvin Dixon 2020: Sunday Night, Raymond Carver 2019: Virginia Street, Jennifer Hayashida 2018: What Seems Like Joy, Kaveh Akbar 2017: Aunties, Kevin Young 2016: For the Union Dead, Robert Lowell 2015: The Cambridge Afternoon Was Gray, Alicia Ostriker 2014: Spirit of the Bat, Peggy Shumaker 2013: Thanks, W. S. Merwin 2012: Sweetness, Stephen Dunn 2011: I Remember, Anne Sexton 2010: Letter, Franz Wright 2009: 23rd Street Runs Into Heaven, Kenneth Patchen 2008: HOUSEHOLD ACTIVITY NO. 26, J.R. Quackenbush 2007: from Briggflatts, Basil Bunting 2006: The Chores, Frannie Lindsay 2005: Direct Address, Joan Larkin

[april-is]

April 18, 2025: I want a president, Zoe Leonard

I want a president Zoe Leonard

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

==

Primarily a visual artist, Zoe Leonard wrote this in the early 1990s. You can see the original here and a cool out-of-print book version here.

More prose poems.

Today in: 

2024: Fourteen, Marie Howe 2023: I wanted to be surprised., Jane Hirshfield 2022: Short Talk on Waterproofing, Anne Carson 2021: Cindy Comes To Hear Me Read, Jill McDonough 2020: from This Magic Moment, David Kirby 2019: Poem In Which I Become Wolverine, José Olivarez 2018: In the Beginning God Said Light, Mary Szybist 2017: from Contradictions: Tracking Poems, Adrienne Rich 2016: I Said Yes but I Meant No, Dean Young 2015: Cardinal Cardinal, Stephen Dunn 2014: Ezra Pound’s Proposition, Robert Hass 2013: Wistful sounds like a brand of air freshener, Bob Hicok 2012: Not Getting Closer, Jack Gilbert 2011: Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car, Dan Pagis 2010: The Moss of His Skin, Anne Sexton 2009: It’s This Way, Nazim Hikmet 2008: The Problem With Skin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil 2007: Serenade, Terrance Hayes 2006: The Old Liberators, Robert Hedin 2005: Morning Song, Sylvia Plath

[april-is]

April 17, 2025: I Have a Time Machine, Brenda Shaughnessy

I Have a Time Machine Brenda Shaughnessy

But unfortunately it can only travel into the future at a rate of one second per second, which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant committees and even to me. But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next moment and to the next. Thing is, I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead— well not zipping—And if I try to get out of this time machine, open the latch, I'll fall into space, unconscious, then desiccated! And I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that. So I stay inside. There's a window, though. It shows the past. It's like a television or fish tank. But it's never live; it's always over. The fish swim in backward circles. Sometimes it's like a rearview mirror, another chance to see what I'm leaving behind, and sometimes like blackout, all that time wasted sleeping. Myself age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment at having lost a library book. Myself lurking in a candled corner expecting to be found charming. Me holding a rose though I want to put it down so I can smoke. Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me because the explosion of some dark star all the way back struck hard at mother's mother's mother. I turn away from the window, anticipating a blow. I thought I'd find myself an old woman by now, traveling so light in time. But I haven't gotten far at all. Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I'd like; the past is so horribly fast.

--

Also:  + When I Say That Loving Me Is Kind Of Like Being A Chicago Bulls Fan, Hanif Abdurraqib + Kul, Fatimah Asghar

Today in: 

2024: You Belong to the World, Carrie Fountain 2023: Mammogram Call Back with Ultra Sound, Ellen Bass 2022: Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness, Franny Choi 2021: Weather, Claudia Rankine 2020: The Understudy, Bridget Lowe 2019: Against Dying, Kaveh Akbar 2018: Close Out Sale, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz 2017: Things That Have Changed Since You Died, Laura Kasischke 2016: Percy, Waiting for Ricky, Mary Oliver 2015: My Heart, Kim Addonizio 2014: My Skeleton, Jane Hirshfield 2013: Catch a Body, Oliver Bendorf 2012: No, Mark Doty 2011: from Narrative: Ali, Elizabeth Alexander 2010: Baseball Canto, Lawrence Ferlinghetti 2009: Nothing but winter in my cup, Alice George 2008: Poppies in October, Sylvia Plath 2007: I Imagine The Gods, Jack Gilbert 2006: An Offer Received In This Morning’s Mail, Amy Gerstler 2005: The Last Poem In The World, Hayden Carruth

[april-is]

April 16, 2025: As a Human Being, Jericho Brown

As a Human Being Jericho Brown

There is the happiness you have And the happiness you deserve. They sit apart from one another The way you and your mother Sat on opposite ends of the sofa After an ambulance came to take Your father away. Some good Doctor will stitch him up, and Soon an aunt will arrive to drive Your mother to the hospital Where she will settle next to him Forever, as promised. She holds The arm of her seat as if she could Fall, as if it is the only sturdy thing, And it is since you've done what You always wanted. You fought Your father and won, marred him. He'll have a scar he can see all Because of you. And your mother, The only woman you ever cried for, Must tend to it as a bride tends To her vows, forsaking all others No matter how sore the injury. No matter how sore the injury Has left you, you sit understanding Yourself as a human being finally Free now that nobody's got to love you.

--

Also by Jericho Brown:  + Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry + Track 5: Summertime - as performed by Janis Joplin + Prayer of the Backhanded

Today in: 

2024: Love Comes Quietly, Robert Creeley 2023: After Touching You, I Think of Narcissus Drowning, Leila Chatti 2022: Will You?, Carrie Fountain 2021: After Graduate School, Valencia Robin 2020: in lieu of a poem, i’d like to say, Danez Smith 2019: from The Invention of Streetlights 2018: Returning, Tami Haaland 2017: An Ordinary Composure, James L. White 2016: Verge, Mark Doty 2015: Reasons to Survive November, Tony Hoagland 2014: Unhappy Hour, Richard Siken 2013: Just Once, Anne Sexton 2012: Talk, Noelle Kocot 2011: Why They Went, Elizabeth Bradfield 2010: Anxiety, Frank O’Hara 2009: The Continuous Life, Mark Strand 2008: An old story, Bob Hicok 2007: you can’t be a star in the sky without holy fire, Frank X. Gaspar 2006: For the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu, A.M. Klein 2005: Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem, Bob Hicok

[april-is]

April 15, 2025: Tree, Jane Hirshfield

Tree Jane Hirshfield

It is foolish to let a young redwood   grow next to a house.

Even in this   one lifetime, you will have to choose.

That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.   Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

--

Also by Jane Hirshfield:  + My Life Was the Size of My Life + Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station And a Full Moon Over the Gulf of Mexico and All its Invisible Fishes + A Small-Sized Mystery

Today in: 

2024: Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation, Natalie Diaz 2023: Dutch Elm Disease, Valencia Robin 2022: More Bang for Your Buck Running Scared, Brennan Bestwick 2021: Rain, Peter Everwine 2020: Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale, Dan Albergotti 2019: Prayer, Galway Kinnell 2018: Egg, C.G. Hanzlicek 2017: Well Water, Randall Jarrell 2016: For Desire, Kim Addonizio 2015: The Coming of Light, Mark Strand 2014: Flying Low, Stephen Dunn 2013: The Envoy, Jane Hirshfield 2012: Red Wand, Sandra Simonds 2011: Trying to Raise the Dead, Dorianne Laux 2010: Asking for Directions, Linda Gregg 2009: A Blessing, James Wright 2008: New York, New York, David Berman 2007: Waste Land Limericks, Wendy Cope 2006: There Are Two Worlds, Larry Levis 2005: America, Allen Ginsberg

[april-is]

April 14, 2025: Sorrows, Lucille Clifton

Sorrows Lucille Clifton

who would believe them winged who would believe they could be

beautiful         who would believe they could fall so in love with mortals

that they would attach themselves as scars attach and ride the skin

sometimes we hear them in our dreams rattling their skulls         clicking their bony fingers

envying our crackling hair our spice filled flesh

they have heard me beseeching as I whispered into my own

cupped hands       enough not me again enough       but who can distinguish

one human voice   amid such choruses of desire

==

More Lucille Clifton:  blessing the boats   |   Jackie Robinson   |   wishes for sons

Today in: 

2024: The Wordsworth Effect, Joyce Sutphen 2023: Spring Poem, Colleen O’Connor 2022: Red, Mary Ruefle 2021: Bathing, Allison Seay 2020: A Small Moment, Cornelius Eady 2019: You Meet Someone and Later You Meet Their Dancing and You Have to Start Again, David Welch 2018: Henry Clay’s Mouth, Thomas Lux 2017: When Your Small Form Tumbled into Me, Tracy K. Smith 2016: Eve Recollecting the Garden, Grace Bauer 2015: from I Love A Broad Margin To My Life, Maxine Hong Kingston 2014: Gift, Czeslaw Milosz 2013: This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin 2012: We Did Not Make Ourselves, Michael Dickman 2011: Happiness (3), Jean Valentine 2010: When I Think, Jeanne Marie Beaumont 2009: The Poem, Franz Wright 2008: Morning Poem, Robin Becker 2007: Supple Cord, Naomi Shihab Nye 2006: Wish For a Young Wife, Theodore Roethke 2005: The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy, Jeffrey McDaniel