Jim Whiteside I held the fruit the way I might have helda feather, turning it to view each side.I loved the story of the fig wasp, Agaonidae, how in each fig’s centerwas a wingless and silent creature, disintegrated,eaten. Led by food to become food. This was when I still felt whole ownershipof myself, before any …
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 …
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 …
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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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 …
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 …
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 …
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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Kim Addonizio – Ways Of Being Lonely
Kim Addonizio (July 31, 1954 -) Like a haunted river no bridge wants to lay itself down over.Like a taxidermied grizzly in the student union.You cry at a frequency only subatomic insects can hear.That time with him in Houston.Sometimes you flame into a scary flower.An eruption of coherence in the postmodern seminar.You stand in a …
Lucille Clifton – Poem to My Yellow Coat
Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 – February 13, 2010) today i mourn my coat.my old potato.my yellow mother.my horse with buttons.my rind.today she split her skinlike a snake,refusing to excuse my backfor being bigfor being oldfor reaching toward othercuffs and sleeves.she cracked like a whip andfell apart,my terrible teacher to the end;to hell with the …
Francesca Bell – Spring
for my husband, 21 years my senior Francesca Bell There are so many timesI could have killed you.After 28 years of marriage—the only contact sportI’ve ever stuck with—I found myselfcrying this morning,after a trip outside,singing Happy Birthdaythree times through,just to be sure,scrubbing despitethe sting of my split skinas I’ve loved youthrough even the rubof the …
Galway Kinnell – When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone
Galway Mills Kinnell (February 1, 1927 – October 28, 2014) 1 When one has lived a long time alone,one refrains from swatting the flyand lets him go, and one hesitates to strikethe mosquito, though more than willing to slapthe flesh under her, and one lifts the toadfrom the pit too deep to hop out ofand …
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Rudyard Kipling – The Explorer
Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) "There's no sense in going further --it's the edge of cultivation,"So they said, and I believed it --broke my land and sowed my crop --Built my barns and strung my fencesin the little border stationTucked away below the foothillswhere the trails run out and stop. Till …
Amanda Gorman – The Hill We Climb
Amanda Gorman When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. And yet, the …
Rafaella Del Bourgo – Tasmania
Rafaella Del Bourgo The frigid waters of the Huon Rivertrudge along sodden banks,muscling aside grasses, and scolding saplings.Twin swans, crayon black with crimson beaks,hiss and feint at a six-foot snaketricked out in beige and chartreuse.The birds take off, slice the sky;the river licks the scallop pattern on its surface. My house, too, is cold, a …
Carl Phillips – Pale Colors in a Tall Field
Carl Phillips (1959 -) Remind me to show you where the horses finally got freedfor good—not for the freedom of it, or anything likebeauty, though their running was for sure a loveliness, I’mthinking more how there’s a kind of violence to re-enteringunexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but gottorn away from so long …
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Rebecca Rainof – Spring
Rebecca Rainof We broke so many glasses that spring,fingers made slippery with grief.The cheap ones cracked into cosmic array,made cuts too small to see.My father apologizes as he spillshis wine again and waiters scurry.It’s no big deal, he says, then waveshis hands, as if to hide the tremorthat inhabits each of us.We are like infants,newly …
Jeffrey McDaniel – Wooden Bench
Jeffrey McDaniel I was sitting on a wooden benchwhen six men wheeled her on a gurney right past me,except she was inside a wooden boxand the lid was closed. She was on her wayto becoming a skeleton. My fatheris definitely a skeleton at this point.Death is confusing. Is my father the bonesthat sit inside a …
Natalie Diaz – Lake-Loop
Natalie Diaz (September 4, 1978 -) because there was yet no lake into many nights we made the lake a labor, and its necessary laboringsto find the basin not yet openedin my body, yet my body — any bodywet or water from the start, to fill a clay, start being what it ever means, a beginning …
Robert Frost – Meeting and Passing
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) As I went down the hill along the wallThere was a gate I had leaned at for the viewAnd had just turned from when I first saw youAs you came up the hill. We met. But allWe did that day was mingle great and smallFootprints …
Walt Whitman – When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns beforeme,When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divideand measure them,When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured withmuch applause in the lecture-room,How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,Till rising and gliding out I wander' d off …
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Lisel Mueller – Late Hours
Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924 – February 21, 2020) On summer nights the worldmoves within earshoton the interstate with its swishand growl, an occasional sirenthat sends chills through us.Sometimes, on clear, still nights,voices float into our bedroom,lunar and fragmented,as if the sky had let them golong before our birth. In winter we close the windowsand …
Joyce Sutphen – Tango for Ellie
Joyce Sutphen (August 10, 1949 -) The music begins—string bass and drums,then saxophoneand a piano.The steps go like this:slow, slow, quick-quick, slow.For now, your partneris the moon, andjust for this night your hairis black and full of stars.The melody is steady asrain, sweet as birdsong—aa little somethingyou will carry in your earwhen you leave usfor …
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.
Walt Whitman – When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) When I heard the learn’d astronomer,When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,How soon unaccountable I …
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Donald Hall – Bangers and Mash
Donald Hall (September 20, 1928 – June 23, 2018) We flew the Atlantic all night, your headwith its first streak of gray leaningagainst my shoulder, and took a cabto our bed-and-breakfast. We napped,woke up at noon, and rode the tubefrom Russell Square to Piccadilly Circus,where we asked a stranger to takea photograph of us standing …
Ted Kooser – Splitting An Order
Ted Kooser (April 25, 1939 -) I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half,maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread,no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands steadyby placing his forearms firm on the edge of the tableand using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in …
Vijay Seshadri – Visiting San Francisco
Vijay Seshadri (February 13, 1954 -) I wanted to curl upin the comfortable cosmic melancholy of my past,in the sadness of my past being passed.I wanted to tour the museum of my antiquitiesand look at the sarcophagi there.I wanted to wallow like a water buffalo in the cool,sagacious mud of my past,so I wrote you …
Stanley Moss – I’m Sorry
Stanley Moss (June 21, 1925 -) I’m sorry, exhausted, except for funds.I wrote a check, the date October 18without the year, to Theresa Monrosefor a hundred dollars, I did not writethe amount longhand.My conversation with friendsis something like the way I wrote that checkwhen I try to tell what I owe them.I don’t get it …
