Author: tgifreytag

Poem-A-Day April 5: crowdsourced

Hello Friends,

Poetry comes from all places, including Instagram. Today’s poem by Sierra DeMulder, from her 2023 collection Ephemera, is what I would call a Found Poem — one that takes existing texts and excerpts, reorders, and collages them into a new whole piece.

Enjoy.
Ællen

I Asked Why Have You Denied Yourself Love

     Answers crowdsourced from the author’s Instagram. Italics denote direct quotes.

Absent parent(s)

and the man who made me
mistrust ever man after.
I haven’t earned it yet—

what is love if not a salary?
The sweet treat we get
for being demure.

It feels too selfish,
too vulgar, unladylike
to gorge myself

on the moist cake of it.
I’ve got bad credit,
a pretty sibling, a rank

history of mistakes,
each one more foul
than the last. The timing

was all wrong.
The timing was right
but I was afraid

of losing it.
I am disorganized.
My brain is broken,

and it was stuck on something
I thought was love.
I’ve spit out it before

just to prove that I can.
I believe I am ugly.
and in the end,

it’s just easier this way,
familiar as a callous,
tongued over like

a cracked tooth:
suffering feels cleaner,
because if I start to believe

I actually deserve love,
I’d have to find
unacceptable all

those incapable of
giving it.

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Poem-A-Day April 4: The Mussel

Hello Friends,

In the opening poem of his newest collection Moving the Bones (2024), poet Rick Barot tells us, “if you look at something / long enough, it will have something / to say to you.” I love the presence of that act of looking in today’s poem from the same collection, about the humble mussel.

This poem is written in quatrains, or groups of four lines. We call each group of lines in a poem a stanza — which can be traced to the Italian word for “room” or “stopping place.” As Edward Hirsch tells us in A Poet’s Glossary, “each stanza in a poem is like a room in a house, a lyric dwelling place.” Notice how this poem flows from room to room as you read.

Enjoy.
Ællen

The Mussel

One way of being hidden
is to be in plain sight, looking like a black rock
among other rocks in a streambed.
Another way is to be small

and latch on to the fins and gills
of fish and travel up rapids,
up rivers, across lakes, then let go,
away from the home that is every beginning.

Still another way is to live
so long you outlive counting,
like the pine twisted into its thousand
years, like the cousin species deep in the silt

of its two centuries. Another way
of being hidden is to be a part
of something large, a speck in the vibrating
web of water and earth.

And still another way is to be
quiet and rare, the gold
of broken places, though what we might see
as love continues in the fire, rain,

snow, light, and pollen that keep their touch
on those broken places.
One more way of being hidden
is to close so completely you contain

the world’s dreaming, the skies
of that sleep glowing like nacre: faintly blue,
as though it were water,
faintly pink, the eyeshadow of spring.

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If you enjoyed today’s poem, Rick Barot was also featured for several previous Poem-A-Days (either as the author or as the professor who introduced me to the poem).

Poem-A-Day April 3: an ocean to land upon

Hello Friends,

There’s a poem by Sharon Olds called “Little Things” that ends “as if it were our duty to / find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.” Sometimes I think it’s the duty of the poets to bring us news of those little things, to help bind us to this world — as the poet Joshua Jennifer Espinoza searches for in today’s poem.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza was also previously featured for Poem-A-Day April 6, 2024 (“Things Haunt”) and Poem-A-Day April 14, 2022 (“The Moon is Trans”).

Enjoy!
Ællen

The Sunset and the Purple-Flowered Tree

I talk to a screen who assures me everything is fine.

I am not broken. I am not depressed. I am simply

in touch with the material conditions of my life. It is

the end of the world, and it’s fine. People laugh

about this, self-soothing engines sputtering

through a nosedive. Not me. I’ve gone and lost my

sense of humor when I need it most. This is why I

speak smoke into a scene. I dance against language

and abandon verse halfway through, like a broken-

throated singer. I wander around the front yard,

pathless as a little ant at the tip of a curled-up

cactus. Birds flit in and out of shining branches.

A garden blooms large in my throat. Color and life

conspire against my idea of the world. I have to

laugh until I am crying, make an ocean to land

upon in this sea of flames. Here I am.

Another late-winter afternoon,

     the sunset and the purple-flowered tree

trying their best to keep me alive.

■

Poem-A-Day April 2: Every empire promises

To Be Self-Evident

     After Edward Said

Every empire tells its subjects a story
of revelation. The trees let down
their aging leaves, listless
in late drought. The children thrive on filtration,
their classroom air and their selfies sanitized.

Every empire seems invincible
as its borders submerge, its manicured hillsides
incinerate between guaranteed
next-day deliveries.

Every empire eulogizes
its value system, splurges
for pyrotechnics, decorates
its mausoleums for the holidays.

Every empire turns
against its colonies, cradling
the embassy’s crystal in bubble wrap,
packing extra treats for the dogs on the evacuation flight home.

Every empire promises
a revolution against itself. The children
are tasked with designing the future, growing
walls of hydroponic greens,
rebranding old protest anthems.
Every empire denies the iceberg
it crashes into, hires a chorus, funds the arts.

Every empire sings itself a lullaby.

■
Hello Friends,

Poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha includes today’s poem in her 2024 National Book Award winning collection Something About Living. She dedicates the poem “After Edward Said” — for your reference, Edward Said was a Palestinian-American professor of literature at Columbia University who said, “Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.”

While poetry can be a lullaby, what I find self-evident about this piece is that poetry can also be an antidote to lullabies. I like to think that all the best poems are about memorably awakening the reader to something you may not have noticed or seen from quite a certain angle (or slant as Emily Dickinson would say). Whether about empire or nature or grief or love, I hope every poem I send you this month is awake to something.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 1: Happy National Poetry Month 2025!

Hello Friends,

Happy National Poetry Month 2025! In celebration, I will be sending you one poem per day just for the month of April: 30 days, 30 poems, 30 poets.

For those of you new to the list: No prior poetry experience is required! I try my best not to send you some obtuse obscure long ode that’s impossible to understand. My selections do skew heavily, but not exclusively, to American poets writing in English — hence the name “Meet Me in 811,” the Dewey Decimal Code for American Poetry (and my favorite part of the library to wander around picking random books off the shelves).

This poem-a-day series is strictly for personal use only; in almost all cases, I do not have poets’ nor poetry publishers’ permission to reproduce their work. For a more official poem-a-day email list, please visit the Academy of American Poets (poets.org), the creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month.

I do my best to preserve each poem’s format; however, please note that email clients tend to have minds of their own and may force a word onto the next line if a line is too long for your screen size.

And now for today’s poem, by a former poet laureate of Oregon Kim Stafford:

Advice from a Raindrop

You think you’re too small
to make a difference? Tell me
about it. You think you’re
helpless, at the mercy of forces
beyond your control? Been there.

Think you’re doomed to disappear
just one small voice among millions?
That’s not weakness, trust me. That’s
your wild card, your trick, your
implement. They won’t see you coming

until you’re there, in their faces, shining,
festive, expendable, eternal. Sure you’re
small, just one small part of a storm that
changes everything. That’s how you win,
my friend, again and again and again.

■
One thing I love about this poem is how the final “again and again and again” echoes a rhyming word “rain” and mimics the repetitive sound of it falling.

For those of you looking for a storm to join, Planned Parenthood and coalition partners are holding a huge rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow Wednesday April 2 to mark the oral arguments in the Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic case, which could allow states to block Medicaid patients from accessing care at Planned Parenthood health centers. You can find more details here.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 30: The sound of quiet.

Hello Friends,

It’s the last day of April, and we’ve packed a lot into these 30 days: couplets, tercets, quatrains, a few sonnets, an ode, and plenty of free verse; poems from the 1600s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s; poems by Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian American, Arab American, and white poets; poems by transgender, queer, and straight poets; and more. Thank you so much for joining me in this month-long celebration of poetry.

If you had a favorite poem this month, I’d love to hear about it. Your replies all month long let me know someone out there is reading these poems I send out, so thank you.

I have one last poem for you from the Tunisian American poet Leila Chatti. This piece was originally published as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series on January 3, 2023.

Enjoy,
Ællen

I Went Out to Hear

The sound of quiet. The sky
indigo, steeping
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.
I heard the beating
of bats’ wings before
the air troubled above
my head, turned to look
and saw them gone.
On the surface of the black
lake, a swan and the moon
stayed perfectly
still. I knew this was
a perfect moment.
Which would only hurt me
to remember and never
live again. My God. How lucky to have lived
a life I would die for.

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Poem-A-Day April 28: Praise the ear.

Isn’t Every Love Poem an Unfinished Love Poem?

Praise the ear.
Praise the hair curling
around the ear.

Praise the music
we never turn on,
only make.

Praise the caps
of your shoulders, my lips
pressed against them.

Praise the poem
I was trying to finish
when you showed up

at my door.

■
Today’s poem can be found in poet Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s 2018 collection How to Love the Empty Air.

Poem-A-Day April 27: GREAT morning

Hello Friends,

Poet Eve L. Ewing writes about today’s poem: “This poem started out as being about the everyday moments that sustain us, born from an interaction with a bus driver. Due, probably, to both the times we live in and my generally apocalyptic character, it also became a poem about the end of the world. From the perspective of Western theology, eschatology often implies a straight line between the beginning of time and our inevitable doom. As an Afrofuturist, I have a less linear view of life and death. I think the links between ancestry and the future are blurry and cyclical. Anyway, we really are stardust.”

This poem was originally published as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series on February 6, 2024. Many of the lines in this poem are long and will wrap if you are reading this on a phone.

Enjoy,
Ællen

eschatology

i’m confident that the absolute dregs of possibility for this society,
the sugary coffee mound at the bottom of this cup,
our last best hope that when our little bit of assigned plasma implodes
it won’t go down as a green mark in the cosmic ledger,
lies in the moment when you say hello to a bus driver
and they say it back—

when someone holds the door open for you
and you do a little jog to meet them where they are—

walking my dog, i used to see this older man
and whenever i said good morning,
he replied ‘GREAT morning’—

in fact, all the creative ways our people greet each other
may be the icing on this flaming trash cake hurtling through the ether.

when the clerk says how are you
and i say ‘i’m blessed and highly favored’

i mean my toes have met sand, and wiggled in it, a lot.
i mean i have laughed until i choked and a friend slapped my back.
i mean my niece wrote me a note: ‘you are so smart + itellajet’

i mean when we do go careening into the sun,

i’ll miss crossing guards ushering the grown folks too, like ducklings
and the lifeguards at the community pool and
men who yelled out the window that they’d fix the dent in my car,
right now! it’d just take a second—

and actually everyone who tried to keep me alive, keep me afloat,
and if not unblemished, suitably repaired.

but i won’t feel too sad about it,
becoming a star

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Poem-A-Day April 26: After Language

Hello Friends,
Today is Lesbian Visibility Day! We’re celebrating the Sapphics with a poem by Chaia Heller, which can be found in the anthology My Lover is a Woman: Contemporary Lesbian Love Poems edited by Lesléa Newman and published in 1996. Unlike yesterday’s poem, which nearly avoided punctuation altogether, today’s poem relies heavily on the specific curves of parentheses.
Enjoy,
Ællen

After Language

When all the drowsy metaphors
about women and fruit
have been peeled
and devoured;

there’s just you, me
a bowl full of summer peaches,
two parentheses
with nothing in between
     (just space)
for the tongue’s imagination

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