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Poem-A-Day April 10: Allowables

Hello Friends,
Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day, and I couldn’t think of a better poet to have stashed in your pocket than Nikki Giovanni, who we lost this past year. Today’s selection comes from her 2013 collection Chasing Utopia and is about a spider, but also about how we treat other animals and our fellow human beings.
Enjoy.
— Ællen

Allowables

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn’t
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don’t think
I’m allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened

■

Poem-A-Day April 9: Cartography

Hello Friends,
The form of today’s poem by Clint Smith (from his 2023 collection Above Ground) is important and difficult to preserve for mobile phones, so I have included an image of the poem as well as the text below. The image comes from an outstanding poetry Instagram account @poetryisnotaluxury.
Enjoy.
— Ællen

Cartography

In has been brought to my attention that Louisiana’s coastline in eroding

so quickly that it is losing a football field of marshland every hundred

minutes. All the while the map of Louisiana has remained the same

for several decades, though if it were accurate, hundreds of

miles of land would disappear into the Gulf of Mexico.

I think about how difficult it is for any of us to

admit that we’re not who we used to be.

That something in us has been lost

over time and will probably never

come back. It’s so hard to

disappear without anyone

noticing. It’s so hard to

be honest about the

changing contours

of your past with-

out the sky

murmuring

under its

breath.

■

Poem-A-Day April 8: A Drink of Water

Hello Friends,

One of the things I want you to notice about today’s poem by Jeffrey Harrison from his 2014 collection Into Daylight is that the entire poem is one long run-on sentence, mimicking the flowing stream of water from a kitchen faucet. But it is also broken into five-line stanzas (called cinquains), as if each stanza were its own gulp of water, again mimicking the content of the poem.

Enjoy.
— Ællen

A Drink of Water

When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap
and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways
to drink directly from the stream of cool water,
I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone,
who used to do the same thing at that age;

and when he lifts his head back up, and, satisfied,
wipes the water dripping from his cheek
with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture
my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him
to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,

because I like remembering my brother
when he was young, decades before anything
went wrong, and I like the way my son
becomes a little more my brother for a moment
through this small habit born of a simple need,

which, natural and unprompted, ties them together
across the bounds of death, across time . . .
as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds
and entered this one through the kitchen faucet,
my son and brother drinking the same water.

■

Poem-A-Day April 7: Infinity Ghazal

Infinity Ghazal Beginning with Lice and Never Ending with Lies

For Hasna Henna and the Rohingya

Lice? My aunt once drew a comb through my hair steady;
she wouldn’t let what feeds on blood eat my inner tree.

Where now is the word for such intimacy? I know it still,
but all I see are jungles burnt of our rarest trees.

My point is: it takes a while to say, “I am a fire hazard,” or,
“a household of rare birds” is another way to say tree.

I wrote one draft of this poem, then she died. Will I
forget her name, Hasna Henna? Let’s smell a tree;

night-blooming jasmine, o-so-heavenly! A sapling
succeeds by flourishing from a tree’s seed.

How else to perfume these needs we breathe? A sapling
of course = a small and soft tree (i.e. baby tree).

I grieve the rice she fed me off a palm leaf.
Only now can I fully marvel: how finely formed is a tree!

Someone I loved said to stop with the oceans in my poems —
well, oceans + oceans + oceans! We drown so many trees.

(Night blooming tree = baby tree = once and future tree.)
Lately, all I think about are trees.

Read this again to replace tree with refugee.
Tarfia = joy in the margins + one who lies to protect trees.

■

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by the Bangladeshi American poet Tarfia Faizullah can be found in the December 2018 issue of Poetry Magazine. Around that time, over 700,000 refugees had fled Myanmar for Bangladesh to escape the Rohingya genocide, as referenced in this poem’s dedication.

A ghazal is an Arabic poetic form that consists of self-contained couplets, each of which ends on the same word or phrase (the radif). What is special about this ghazal is that in the second-to-last line, the poet asks us to re-read this poem replacing the radif “tree” with “refugee.”

How did you feel when you got to that line in the poem? Did you re-read the poem again? Why do you think the poet didn’t just write the poem with “refugee” in place of “tree” in the first place? How was this word play similar and different from yesterday’s poem replacing “gun” with “pun”?

One other trademark of the ghazal form is including the poet’s own name in the final couplet, like a signature, as Tarfia Faizullah does here.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!

— Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 6: Instead, we say pun

When the Lit Mag Rejects Another Poem About Motherhood

my uterus folds into a gun—
although, I’ve never carried
one. I don’t even like to say the word around our daughter
who grew toes in there. Instead,
we say pun when we chat
about the news at dinner. But they’re everywhere,
puns. At the store, a small
boy with puns for hands
shouts gotcha, gotcha, gotcha down an aisle of hula hoops,
bubbles, floaties,
and water puns.
At the checkout, women’s bodies on health magazines are covered
by plastic panels,
but puns, big ones,
are on full display by the candy and gum. We pass billboards
for The Pun Show on the way
home and a line of protestors
that wraps around the women’s center. “Nothing is easy about motherhood,”
is written on a sign in all caps
over a heartline zigzagging
red over a shouting mouth. I turn up the volume and a bird sings
pío, pío, pío in Spanish.
Fear laps at me
like the shoreline, slowly eating this state that’s shaped like a pun.
Nothing is easy
about motherhood,
but it is worthy of poems, magazines, billboards, and songs, so
when I pull into the driveway,
I decide to stick to my puns
and send out another mother poem tomorrow. For now, we unload
groceries and make plans
to go to a concert—our first
big one since becoming parents. Neither of us says the what if
we’re both thinking.
Piu, piu, piu,
our daughter hops on the sofa. Piu, piu, piu. Piu, piu, piu.
Piu, piu, piu.

■

Hello Friends,

Today’s poem by Gloria Muñoz can be found in American Poets (Fall/Winter 2024), the magazine of the Academy of American Poets. As you may recall, the Academy of American Poets are the creators and sponsors of National Poetry Month (more info at poets.org).

As a reminder, I do my best to preserve each poem’s format; however, email clients will force a line break when a line is too long for your screen size.

Thank you for celebrating poetry month with me!

— Ællen

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.

■

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.

■

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