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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Poem-A-Day April 25: If you ever woke in your dress at 4am

Hello Friends,
One of the remarkable things I want you to notice about today’s poem from Kim Addonizio is how much can be said without punctuation.
Enjoy,
Ællen

To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall

If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

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Poem-A-Day April 24: the only time I really prayed

Ode to Donor Gametes

I was not thinking of Russia
or the Holocaust or eugenics
when I picked the donor
from an online catalog like
I was ordering a new pair of shoes.
I don’t mean to sound blasé.
It was more complicated than that.
But by the time spring came
and the third failed IVF, I didn’t care
about SAT scores or eye color;
I wanted any embryo that latched
to my uterine wall and grew.
The German philosophy major,
the filmmaker from California, even
the one whose favorite food was pork.
What did genes matter? I already knew
I’d name my second child for dead relatives
from the old country, the ones
who made it out before the camps.
My uterus washed with grief, empty
kiddush cup after the seder.
That was the only time I really prayed.
That day when I paced outside,
waiting for a call from my doctor
with good news, eggs and sperm
married in a petri dish, an offering
from a Midwestern girl
with ovarian abundance and kind eyes
who knew to look away.

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Today’s poem by Robin Silbergleid was originally published as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series on August 14, 2023.

Poem-A-Day April 23: Doubt thou the stars are fire

Hello Friends,
Since it’s his birthday, today I’m sharing just a few lines by the Bard himself William Shakespeare, taken from Hamlet Act 2, scene 2. Polonius is reading aloud a letter Hamlet has written to Ophelia.
Enjoy,
Ællen

Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.

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Poem-A-Day April 22: The “Change” in Climate Change

Hello Friends,
Today is Earth Day, so we’re going to read this poem by Jacob Shores-Argüello that first appeared in Poetry Magazine in June 2023. The poem is written in couplets, or groups of two lines, but because the lines are long they may wrap if you’re reading this on a phone.
Enjoy,
Ællen

The “Change” in Climate Change

My cousin WhatsApps me from Costa Rica, fits the family
into the rectangle of video as they wave from the balcony.

He turns the phone, shows me a swirl of birds in the hurting sky.
But they are not birds. They are neighbor Tinoco’s roof tiles

flying in a storm’s rotary energy. My family is calling because
I’m in Oklahoma, which, to them, is synonym for tornado.

Te amo, I say as my cousin lowers the phone for our grandmother
to hear. She’s scared because she’s lived in the town for 80 years

and can’t recognize all these new skies. Because a year before,
a hurricane reaved its way across this country for the first time

in recorded history. Tornado or torbellino or something else,
I ask her about the valley’s strange wind. And she laughs, says

that she was calling to ask me the same thing. I don’t know why
I keep forgetting the change in climate change. My grandmother

sighs as the sky darkens to the color of rum. Why I still think
that we’ll have names for all the things that will come.

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Poem-A-Day April 21: I got it.

Come. And Be My Baby

The highway is full of big cars
going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that’ll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass
And you sit wondering
where you’re going to turn.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow
But others say we’ve got a week or two
The paper is full of every kind of blooming horror
And you sit wondering
What you’re gonna do.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

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Today’s poem can be found in Maya Angelou: Poems (1981) by Maya Angelou.

Poem-A-Day April 20: We Lived Happily During the War

We Lived Happily During the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

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Today’s poem opens the 2019 collection Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, a deaf Ukrainian American poet and a professor at Princeton. You can listen to Kaminsky read this poem here.

Poem-A-Day April 19: Cold Sweat

Cold Sweat

Drenched in sweat.
I can see the stars
through a bullet hole in the ceiling.
I run my hands through my hair.
My damp trousers
are sticking to my legs.

I hear a noise.
I look around.
There’s no one else in the room.
I cannot feel my body.
I look in the mirror.
It was the chatter of my teeth.

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Hello Friends,
Today’s poem comes from a remarkable 2022 collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. If you liked today’s poem, you may also want to check out Mosab Abu Toha’s “What Is Home?”, or pick up the whole book from your local library or independent bookstore.
Enjoy.
Ællen

Poem-A-Day April 18: Shadowed Dreams

Hello Friends,
Today’s poem by Gladys May Casely Hayford was published way back in 1927, when it wasn’t always easy to get away with Sapphic undertones. Almost all of the women poets of this era had gone out of print when a University of Nebraska English professor Maureen Honey revived them in the 1989 anthology Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, so we have her to thank for being able to read this poem today.
Enjoy,
Ællen

The Serving Girl

The calabash wherein she served my food
Was smooth and polished as sandalwood;
Fish, as white as the foam of the sea,
Peppered, and golden fried for me.
She brought palm wine that carelessly slips
From the sleeping palm tree’s honeyed lips.
But who can guess, or even surmise,
The countless things she served with her eyes?

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Poem-A-Day April 17: long noodles, long life

Hello Friends,
Ina Cariño is a Filipinx American poet and author of Feast (2023). They write about this piece: “I grew up in the Philippines and was surrounded by folk superstitions without knowing they were superstitions; as in, I’d thought of them as facts. After moving to the U.S. at the age of seven, I looked back on my early childhood with more of a removed mindset due to being surrounded by a new culture, new facts, and new environs, all of which negated the superstitions I grew up with. Culture shock aside, I am still fond of the folk stories of my youth — and I am still trying to reconcile the fact of my existence in the diaspora with the magic I used to believe in.”
Enjoy.
Ællen

Everything is Exactly the Same as it Was the Day Before

mama says: long noodles, long life,
so I slurp them loud, drink gingery
broth—polka-dot beads of sweat
forming as my nose hovers over
the soup’s steam. circles for luck.

circles on my dress. papa says:
make a lot of noise! so the children
bang on pots & pans to hush
yesterday’s demons. later, in the cold,

the family plods up the hill to wonder
at the fireworks, sky like a warzone lit
with spraying flames from Roman Candles—
fire on the ground from Watusi whips snaking
& coiling, sizzling our feet.

I feel it all in my chest—
a drumming,
a warning, a spell.

back in the yard, granny doles out rice
& meat, pineapple liquor, glass bottles
of Sprite. but I am snoring by midnight,
my sisters & I still swathed in red chiffon.

by morning, I cry because I missed it.
I cry because they say I’m not alone.
I cry because home is a warning,
its pulse a whiff of flint in the dark.

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