Yolande Cornelia Nikki Giovanni Jr (June 7, 1943) I love you because the Earth turns round the sun because the North wind blows north sometimes because the Pope is Catholic and most Rabbis Jewish because the winters flow into springs and the air clears after a storm because only my love for …
Alison Luterman – Some Girls
Alison Luterman Some girls can’t help it; they are lit sparklers,hot-blooded, half naked in the depths of winter,tagging moving trains with the bright insignia of theirfury.I’ve seen their inked torsos: falcons, swans, meteorshowers.And shadowed their secret rendezvous,walking and flying all night over paths traced like veinsthrough the deep body of the forestwhere they are trying …
Ron Padgett – The Center of Gravity
Ron Padgett (June 17, 1942) The military Jeep was saidto have had a high centerof gravity, thereforesubject to tipping:if you took a curve too fastyou might turn over.A person with very short legshas a low center of gravityand will not tip over easily.The ottoman likewise.When a person is lying flathe or she has the lowest …
Gabrielle Otero – Self-Portrait, Despite What They Say
Gabrielle Otero Being a Latina from the Bronx means:I am everybody and nobody at the same time. I know the soundwaves of the train tracks better than my father’s voice.I look like I should speak Spanish but nobody ever taught me.I look like you should want to bend me over but you try not tothink …
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Terrance Hayes – Pseudacris Crucifer
Terrance Hayes (November 18, 1971 -) The father begins to make the sound a tree frog makesWhen he comes with his son & daughter to a pailOf tree frogs for sale in a Deep South flea marketJust before the last blood of dusk.A tree frog is called a tree frog because it chirpsLike a bird …
Matthew Dickman – Stroke
Matthew Dickman (August 20, 1975 -) The hotel sign blinkingin the brainof my bodystops blinking but notthe whole sign,you know, just a coupleof the letters,the H and T.Then the E and Lso all that is leftwhen the whole leftside of my bodycomes to an endis the O. I am sitting acrossfrom a beautifulwoman, drinking coffee,and …
David Whyte – Sometimes
David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) Sometimesif you move carefullythrough the forest,breathinglike the onesin the old stories,who could crossa shimmering bed of leaveswithout a sound,you come to a placewhose only taskis to trouble youwith tinybut frightening requests,conceived out of nowherebut in this placebeginning to lead everywhere.Requests to stop whatyou are doing right now,andto stop what …
Jasmin Roberts – Self-Selection For Preservation
Jasmin Roberts My grandmother will tell you thatshe does not like white people,does not look them in the eye. W.E.B. Du Bois coined the term double consciousness in 1903.It refers to the psychological experience of viewing oneselfthrough the lens of a racist white society. He meant that to grow up black in Americais to be …
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Hart Crane – At Melville’s Tomb
Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledgeThe dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeathAn embassy. Their numbers as he watched,Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured. And wrecks passed without sound of bells,The calyx of death’s bounty giving backA scattered chapter, livid …
Phillis Wheatley – Imagination
Phillis Wheatley Peters (c. 1753 – December 5, 1784) Thy various works, imperial queen, we see, How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand,And all attest how potent is thine hand. From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:To tell her glories with …
Jane Hirshfield – Today, Another Universe
Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) The arborist has determined:senescence beetles cankerquickened by drought but in any casenot prunable not treatable not to be propped.And so.The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-cries.The trunk where the ant.The red squirrels’ eighty-foot playground.The bark cambium pine-sap cluster of needles.The Japanese patterns the ink-net.The dapple on certain fish.Today, for some, a universe will vanish.First noisily,then …
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Lisel Mueller – In Passing
Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924 – February 21, 2020) How swiftly the strained honeyof afternoon lightflows into darknessand the closed bud shrugs offits special mysteryin order to break into blossom:as if what exists, existsso that it can be lostand become precious.
Philip Bryant – Miles: Prince Of Darkness
Philip Bryant I remember my father's storiesabout him being cold, fitful,reproachful, surly, rude, cruel,unbearable, spiteful, arrogant, hateful.But then he'd playSome Day My Prince Will Comein a swirl of bright spring colorsthat come after a heavy rainmaking the world anew againand like the sometimes-tyrannical kingwho is truly repentant of his transgressionssteps out onto the balconyto greet …
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Neil Gaiman – After Silence
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman (November 10, 1960 -) for Rachel Carson Seasons on seasons. The spring is signaled by birdsongcoyotes screech and yammer in the moonlightand the first flowers open. I saw two owls todayin the daylight, on silent wings.They landed as one and watched me sleepily.Oh who? they called. Or how, or how who?Then …
Naomi Long Madgett – Anniversary Song
Naomi Long Madgett (July 5, 1923 – November 4, 2020) How good it is to let our memory wanderand travel back across the fruitful yearsto count how many miles we’ve walked together!On pinnacles of dreams, through vales of tears,along the level ground of every daywe’ve made our way.In sickness and in health, in joy and …
Elizabeth Alexander – Butter
Elizabeth Alexander (May 30, 1962 -) My mother loves butter more than I do,more than anyone. She pulls chunks offthe stick and eats it plain, explainingcream spun around into butter! Growing upwe ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemonand butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,butter melting in small pools in the heartsof Yorkshire puddings, butter …
Barbara Lydecker Crane – Mother And Child
Barbara Lydecker Crane Portrait painting, so long out of fashion,was all I did. Not by commission—I’d aska friend whose face was lined by life and passionto sit. Then I’d distort a bit: a maskwould simplify and heighten their emotion.This Harlem neighbor’s eyes are spelling fearas she holds her baby tightly with devotionand protection from who …
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WS Merwin – Elegy for a Walnut Tree
William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) Old friend now there is no one alivewho remembers when you were youngit was high summer when I first saw youin the blaze of day most of my life agowith the dry grass whispering in your shadeand already you had lived through warsand echoes of …
Rabindranath Tagore – Joy
Rabindranath Tagore (May 07, 1861 - August 07, 1941) I slept and dreamtthat life was joy.I awoke and sawthat life was duty.I worked — and behold,duty was joy.
Kamilah Aisha Moon – Storm
Kamilah Aisha Moon Night squall raging,black branchesbatter every windowas the sky lashesthe city. Without devices,all I can do is shelter in place& wait the latest nightmareout, find other sourcesof power as I sit in the darksave for a candle burningfor my mother writhingin an ICU & for the worldto make it against all odds.In every …
Emily Dickinson — The Only News I Know
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) The Only News I knowIs Bulletins all DayFrom Immortality.The Only Shows I see—Tomorrow and Today—Perchance Eternity—The Only One I meetIs God-The Only Street—Existence—This traversedIf Other News there be—Or Admirabler Show—I'll tell it You—
Natalie Diaz – The Facts of Art
Natalie Diaz (September 04, 1978 -) woven plaque basket with sunflower design, Hopi, Arizona, before 1935 from an American Indian basketry exhibit in Portsmouth, Virginia The Arizona highway sailed across the desert— a gray battleship drawing a black wake, halting at the foot of the orange mesa, unwilling to go around. Hopi men …
Dorianne Laux – Lord Of The Flies
Dorianne Laux (January 10, 1952 -) “Coronavirus Conference Gets Canceled Because of Coronavirus.”—Bloomberg News, March 10, 2020 I can already see the streetsfilling with corpses piledtenderly along the curbs.First the homeless, thenthe poor, then those whowere lost, depressed, lonely,alone. The rich will be last,top of the pile as they werein life. Dressed in their finery.Oh …
Marissa Davis – Singularity
Marissa Davis after Marie Howe in the wordless beginningiguana & myrrhmagma & reef ghost moth& the cordyceps tickling its nerves& cedar & archipelago & anemonedodo bird & cardinal waiting for its redocean salt & crude oil now blackmuck now most naïve fumbling planktonevery egg clutched in the copycat softof me unwomaned unracedunsexed as the ecstatic prokaryotethat would rage …
William Butler Yeats Down By the Salley Gardens
William Butler Yeats (June 13, 1865 – January 28, 1939) Down by the salley gardensmy love and I did meet;She passed the salley gardenswith little snow-white feet.She bid me take love easy,as the leaves grow on the tree;But I, being young and foolish,with her would not agree.In a field by the rivermy love and I …
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Claudia Serea – Parallel Heavens
Claudia Serea Doors closed,lawns freshly mowed,the heavens line up,a row of suburban houseson a quiet street.I imagine mine painted white,silent and sleepy,a provincial art museumwhere all the angels have been assignedto perpetual paperwork.One can't even thinkto jump from one heaveninto anotherwithout wings,or breaking a bone.And each heavenhas its own way to get to iton parallel …
Erika L Sánchez – Instructions For Living
Erika L. Sánchez It was the way summer hunted me:a sequence of instructionsin the folds of a flower.How do I explain the hatred of the sun,the terrible wonder of being alive?Fuck the fucking birds. I lookedto the sky to join the storms. I couldn’thave imagined you, swift as the lightningI traced with my finger, a …
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Yesika Salgado – Diaspora Writes To Her New Home
Yesika Salgado I am what comes after the civil warafter the dismembered corpsesthe burnt sugar cane fieldsthe mango tree strung with a single hanging bodythe man with his tongue in his pocketthe soldiers and the guerrillathe exodus of my grandmother’s children I arrived after the fleeing. after the bruise was named a desert.after the new …
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