Poem-A-Day April 30: All the words that I gather

Where My Books Go

All the words that I gather,
     And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
     And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
     And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
     Storm-darkened or starry bright.

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Hello Friends,

With those words penned by W.B. Yeats in 1892, we’ve come to the end of the last poem of this National Poetry Month celebration: 30 days, 30 poems, 30 poets. We’ve covered poems from the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s — including every decade from the 1970s through the 2020s. We’ve read lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer poets, Black poets, Native American poets, Asian American poets, Arab American poets, Latina poets, white poets, mixed race poets, and more. We’ve read couplets, tercets, quatrains, cinquains, a ghazal, a haiku, a sonnet, a triple sonnet, and a found poem. Not bad for 30 days!

I hope one or two poems stuck with each of you. Thank you so much again for celebrating poetry month with me. I hope you’ll “meet me in 811” again next April.

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 29: fully formed

What I Didn’t Know Before

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but already
a four-legged beast hellbent on walking,
scrambling after the mother. A horse gives way
to another horse and then suddenly there are
two horses, just like that. That’s how I loved you.
You, off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

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Hello Friends,

Today’s sonnet by the most recent Poet Laureate of the United States Ada Limón can be found in her 2018 collection The Carrying. If you enjoyed today’s poem, Limón was also featured for several previous poem-a-days, which you can peruse on the blog counterpart to this poem-a-day email list, meetmein811.org.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 28: Mother Talks Back to the Monster

Mother Talks Back to the Monster

Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas,
kissed his forehead and tucked him in.
I turned on his night-light and looked for you
in the closet and under the bed. I told him
you were nowhere to be found, but I could smell
your breath, your musty fur. I remember
all your tricks: the jagged shadows on the wall,
click of your claws, the hand that hovered
just above my ankles if I left them exposed.
Since I became a parent I see danger everywhere—
unleashed dogs, sudden fevers, cereal
two days out of date. And even worse
than feeling so much fear is keeping it inside,
trying not to let my love become so tangled
with anxiety my son thinks they’re the same.
When he says he’s seen your tail or heard
your heavy step, I insist that you aren’t real.
Soon he’ll feel too old to tell me his bad dreams.
If you get lonely after he’s asleep, you can
always come downstairs. I’ll be sitting
at the kitchen table with the dishes
I should wash, crumbs I should wipe up.
We can drink hot tea and talk about
the future, how hard it is to be outgrown.

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Hello Friends,

Have you ever felt like a monster? What emotions do you entangle with love or anxiety? Who do you invite to talk at the kitchen table after bedtime? Today’s poem by Carrie Shipers first appeared in the North American Review (Vol. 300, no. 4, 2015). It can also be found in the anthology Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness & Connection (2019) edited by James Crews.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 27: a group of ladybugs

on loveliness

i read somewhere

that a group of ladybugs is called

     a loveliness. and i wonder

what the person who gave them

that name (surely someone of at least

     measurable humanity) knew,

or thought they did, about what love

—what kind, specifically—so embeds

     itself in a thing that the thing,

subsequently, becomes an embodiment

of that love: the way river breaks into current;

the way trees make forest, simply

     by standing closer to each other

than to anything else…

     …by which I mean: i need you

to tell me which of my black spots

     you find loveliest. which interruption

of my red feels most human

to the forest of your fingers; the current

     you river into touch

along my breaking skin.

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Today’s poem by Southern Black ecopoet Ariana Benson appeared in the Kenyon Review (Summer 2024). Read more about ecopoetry here.

Poem-A-Day April 26: you create me

Hello Friends,
Today is International Lesbian Visibility Day, so we’re reading a poem by Black feminist, lesbian, poet, mother, warrior Audre Lorde in which she emphasizes the “creation” in “recreation.” This poem first appeared in Lorde’s 1978 collection The Black Unicorn.
Enjoy.
— Ællen

Recreation

Coming together
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet
paper and pen
neither care nor profit
whether we write or not
but as your body moves
under my hands
charged and waiting
we cut the leash
you create me against your thighs
hilly with images
moving through our word countries
my body
writes into your flesh
the poem
you make of me.

Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat
I love you flesh into blossom
I made you
and take you made
into me.

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Poem-A-Day April 25: Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.

Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you.

Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.
Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
Like you used to make me when you were alive.
Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
you. I know you will know me even though I’m
bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
standing looking out at the river with your rake
in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.

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Hello Friends,

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is one of my favorite poetry professors (from my Stanford days) and one of my favorite poets. In an October 2021 interview about their “Miss you” series of poems, Calvocoressi shares, “When I was younger, when my mom took her life, I didn’t sleep for like four months, because I was so scared her ghost would come. As I’ve gotten older, and particularly I live in an old house now, and the idea of ghosts coming and kind of like, you know, good and generative haunting, is something that really matters to me, and that COVID has in so many ways opened a kind of gate, where it’s just like, oh gosh, there’s just so many, there are so many losses that I wish I could just bring something back.”

If you enjoyed today’s poem, you might also enjoy another of Calvocoressi’s poems featured for Poem-A-Day April 27, 2018 (“The Sun Got All Over Everything”).

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me.

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 24: When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up

This Too Shall Pass

was no consolation to the woman
whose husband was strung out on opiods.

Gone to a better place: useless and suspect intel
for the couple at their daughter’s funeral

though there are better places to be
than a freezing church in February, standing

before a casket with a princess motif.
Some moments can’t be eased

and it’s no good offering clichés like stale
meat to a tiger with a taste for human suffering.

When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up
on a platter of deviled eggs. Everything happens

for a reason: more good tidings someone will try
to trepan your skull to insert. When fire

inhales your house, you don’t care what the haiku says
about seeing the rising moon. You want

an avalanche to bury you. You want to lie down
under a slab of snow, dumb as a jarred

sideshow embryo. What a circus.
The tents dismantled, the train moving on,

always moving, starting slow and gaining speed,
taking you where you never wanted to go.

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Hello Friends,

Sometimes the title of a poem acts as the first line, as in today’s selection by poet Kim Addonizio, originally published as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day on March 12, 2024. There is a reference in this poem to a famous haiku by Mizuta Masahide, which you can read here.

Kim Addonizio was also previously featured for Poem-A-Day April 25, 2024 (“To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall”).

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 23: Triple Sonnet

Hello Friends,
Dorothy Chan (she/they) features a number of triple sonnets in her latest poetry collection Return of the Chinese Femme (2024). In an interview about this book, Chan shares, “Poetry, and in particular, the sonnet, and even more specifically, The Triple Sonnet, contains conversational elements where my speakers use humor, seduction, storytelling, and direct narration to reveal their innermost vulnerabilities. I also believe that poetry is simply another medium of receiving information — but of course, it’s a much more lyric and musical medium — one that allows my speakers to bask in the glory of who they are. I 100% believe in my speaker, the queer Asian femme, being unapologetic at all times.”
Enjoy.
— Ællen

Triple Sonnet Because Boy, You’re Starstruck and I’m a Wonder

Boy, you’re starstruck. I love the way you rub
     the red lipstick off above my Cupid’s bow—
how you call it the halo of my face, because
     girliness equals goodness equals godliness
equals, let’s be real, Oh My Goddess, like that
     moment when Hades and Persephone meet
in the fractured Greek myth, and the Goddess
     of Spring chugs her can of pomegranate soda,
because her future lover is oh so fine, and check
     out that ass. They don’t make stories like this
anymore, do they? Boy, you’re my good afternoon
     delight as the Fountains at the Bellagio go off,
as the tourists at the bistro across the street
     much on Steak Béarnaise and Croque Monsieur

     and Wild Escargots de Bourgogne, as the water
dances to Sinatra’s Come Fly with Me,
     and I’ve just about named every cliché
in the romance book, minus the flowers—
     I had to stuff the Vegas Strip in there, but no,
let me start over now. F was right that day
     in Tallahassee when he traced the lines on
my palm and said the three long ones at the end
     meant I’d have many great loves in my life,
and how I laughed at F’s face after. And oh, Boy,
     was F right, I think, when X asks me on the phone
if I’ve ever been in love, and I say No too fast,
     and I might be lying to her, but who really
cares? I used to want to outsex everyone, make

everyone want, make everyone pant,
     make everyone chew their steak just a little
harder, order that extra shot of whiskey.
     And his lips go wild because I’ve just drank
bourbon—that extra tingle of tongue—
     the red lipstick that gets him all messy,
gets me all messy again, gives me the halo
     above my Cupid’s bow, and what’s it like
being in lust with a man and a woman
     at the same time—it’s like dancing in a corner,
your tank top about to slip off, exposing
     nipples, but you keep dancing. And Boy,
I’m a wonder, and when you kiss me,
     I think about her red lips kissing me.

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Poem-A-Day April 22: narwhals spin upside down

Hello Friends,
In celebration of Earth Day, please enjoy this poem by Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
— Ællen

Invitation

Come in, come in. The water’s fine! You can’t get lost
here. Even if you want to hide behind a clutch
     of spiny oysters—I’ll find you. If you ever leave me
     at night, by boat, you’ll see the arrangement

of red-gold sun stars in a sea of milk. And though
it’s tempting to visit them—stay. I’ve been trained
     to gaze up all my life, no matter the rumble
     on earth, but I learned it’s okay to glance down

into the sea. So many lessons bubble up if you know
where to look. Clouds of plankton churning
     in open whale mouths might send you east
     and chewy urchins will slide you west. Squid know

how to be rich when you have ten empty arms.
Can you believe there are humans who don’t value
     the feel of a good bite and embrace at least once a day?
     Underneath you, narwhals spin upside down

while their singular tooth needles you
like a compass pointed towards home. If you dive
     deep enough where imperial volutes and hatchetfish
     swim, you will find all the colors humans have not yet

named, and wide caves of black coral and clamshell.
A giant squid finally let itself be captured
     in a photograph, and the paper nautilus ripple-flashes
     scarlet and two kinds of violet when it silvers you near.

Who knows what will happen next? And if you still want
to look up, I hope you see the dark sky as oceanic—
     boundless, limitless—like all the shades of blue in a glacier.
     Listen how this planet spins with so much fin, wing, and fur.

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Poem-A-Day April 21: I Give You Back

Hello Friends,
Joy Har­jo is a former poet laureate of the United States and a member of the Mvskoke Nation. Today’s poem can be found in her 1983 collection She Had Some Horses. A content warning: this poem does mention rape and other atrocities, in the context of overcoming them. Harjo has shared that while many of her poems go through rounds of editing, this one came to her almost entirely as-is with very little revision.
— Ællen

I Give You Back

I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you
as myself. I release you with all the
pain I would know at the death of
my children.

You are not my blood anymore.

I give you back to the soldiers
who burned down my home, beheaded my children,
raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters.
I give you back to those who stole the
food from our plates when we were starving.

I release you, fear, because you hold
these scenes in front of me and I was born
with eyes that can never close.

I release you
I release you
I release you
I release you

I am not afraid to be angry.
I am not afraid to rejoice.
I am not afraid to be black.
I am not afraid to be white.
I am not afraid to be hungry.
I am not afraid to be full.
I am not afraid to be hated.
I am not afraid to be loved.

to be loved, to be loved, fear.

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash.
You have gutted me but I gave you the knife.
You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire.

I take myself back, fear.
You are not my shadow any longer.
I won’t hold you in my hands.
You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice
my belly, or in my heart my heart
my heart my heart

But come here, fear
I am alive and you are so afraid
                                                         of dying.

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