#SaturdayPoem

CT Salazar Mostly I’d like to be a spider web because in the rain I’d look like a cracked window without a church to belong to. You could look through me and see the world in front of us. One time, my ex-lovers made a road of tongues for me. I took my shoes off to feel the song a little better, and cut a note short with each step. I want to tell you how many churches I’ve been building to praise little things that deserve more than their few seconds of existence. Like the time I opened the door, smelled hibiscus perfume and knew you were home. Like the time a child told me there was a God and because he was smiling, I believed him. Mostly, I’d like to be a spider web to feel you walk through. To see if you’ll take me with you, despite the spider I bring.

Mostly, I’d like to be a spider web to feel you walk through.
#SaturdayPoem

Gabrielle Calvocoressi No Poems Today Because you're here. There's warm bread to be eaten. With cheese and jam. Small shops to walk into and look around just for the pleasure of looking with you. We spend hours with the seed catalogue imagining a place bigger than ours. I buy more seeds than we'll ever be able to use but here's hoping. Opening a package of seeds in three weeks (they come all the way from Canada!) you'll say, "This is too many seeds!" But come on. Let's be here for the bounty. I can still imagine years of possibility ahead of us. A place with just a little more space for us to stretch out. A new economy and, yes, I know I can't drive at night. But who needs to go anywhere in the future. Maybe friends will come over. Imagine how nice to hear nothing but the stars.

Let's be here for the bounty. I can
still imagine years of possibility
ahead of us.
#SaturdayPoem

Polyamory, with Knives by Jeanann Verlee Just because you fell in love with the river doesn’t mean you must feed it your bones. You can take new lovers. Wine, for instance. And bread. Difficult shoes. Little blue pills. The first boy’s knife. The bowie, the buck, the chef’s. Switch, pocket, butcher, butter. You can submerge in a hotel bath, drainage ditch, Newton Creek, East River. The sea. Eat the whole pan of lasagna. The entire box of Thin Mints. You can go down in mimosas. You can lose yourself in Clifton, or Sexton, Walker, Hooks, Rich, Atwood. Or Hughes. Even the boxer whose poems sewed you shut. Whose hands pulled you from the red red tub. The boy who became boxer who became man who became poet who became husband. Yes, you can love the river. The knife. The pills. The wine. You can love a thousand lonelinesses. You can love the man and each of his hands. Love the brine and the meat and all the tiny ruins.

Just because you fell in love with the river
doesn’t mean you must feed it your bones.
#SaturdayPoem

Instructions on Not Giving Up Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Tumblr View print mode Ada Limón 1976 – More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us
#SaturdayPoem

Piano By Patrick Phillips Touched by your goodness, I am like that grand piano we found one night on Willoughby that someone had smashed and somehow heaved through an open window. And you might think by this I mean I’m broken or abandoned, or unloved. Truth is, I don’t know exactly what I am, any more than the wreckage in the alley knows it’s a piano, filling with trash and yellow leaves. Maybe I’m all that’s left of what I was. But touching me, I know, you are the good breeze blowing across its rusted strings. What would you call that feeling when the wood, even with its cracked harp, starts to sing?

Maybe I’m all that’s left of what I was.
But touching me, I know, you are the good
breeze blowing across its rusted strings.
#SaturdayPoem

Music In The Morning - Dorianne Laux When I think of the years he drank, the scars on his chin, his thinning hair, his eye that still weeps decades after the blow, my knees weaken with gratitude for whatever kept him safe, whatever stopped the glass from cracking and shearing something vital, the fist from lowering, exploding an artery, pressing the clot of blood toward the back of his brain. Now, he sits calmly on the couch, reading, refusing to wear the glasses I bought him, holding the open book at arm's length from his chest. Behind him the windows are smoky with mist and the tile floor is pushing its night chill up through the bare soles of his feet. I like to think he survived in order to find me, in order to arrive here, sober, tired from a long night of tongues and hands and thighs, music on the radio, coffee-- so he could look up and see me, standing in the kitchen in his torn t-shirt, the hem of it brushing my knees, but I know it's only luck that brought him here, luck and a love that had nothing to do with me, except that this is what we sometimes get if we live long enough, if we are patient with our lives.

this is what we sometimes get if we live
long enough, if we are patient with our lives.
#SaturdayPoem

Kyla Jamieson My Sexual Orientation is Spring We change time, make the days longer. I start to forget the pact I made with unhappiness, take myself to the ocean, say I just need to catch the last few minutes of light. This is how spring is love, the way it pulls us towards pleasure.

this is how spring is love
#SaturdayPoem

Weather Hettie Jones 1934 –2024 My folder of poems labeled “weather” holds no clues as to whether or not there’ll be any weather to count on, say, a hard rain like “little nails,” or that deluge “plunging radiant” now that we’ve plunged into war and wars don’t stop like rain stops like that last slow drizzle onto the old tin bathroom vent sweet hint of growth in the soft wet drift north fire or ice, fire or ice are you breathing, are you lucky enough to be breathing

wars don’t stop like rain stops
#SaturdayPoem

Fiona Benson Almond Blossom This morning, love, I’m tired and grave; I can barely hear the wintered bird’s small song over the hum of the central heating. We must trust, I suppose, to the song’s bare minim: that spring will be a green havoc as the trees burst their slums and the dirt breaks open to admit crocus-spear and cyclamen; and though we can’t yet feel it earth’s already begun her slow incline, inch by ruined inch, easing you back from the brink.

this morning, love, I’m tired and grave
#SaturdayPoem

All That Wanting, Right? Devin Kelly I wanted a poem to come out of my sadness, but no poem came. I wanted a revolution to come out of my burnout, but no revolution came. I wanted a bird to fly through my open window, but my window was closed. I wanted sun on an evening when it was already dark. I wanted just a bit of grief rather than despair. &, in my shame, I wanted my childhood back. I wanted to walk backward out of the room where I kept my secrets. I wanted to say I’m hurt before my hurt became a character trait I told no one but myself. When I wanted unknowing, I was given certainty, & when I wanted the hard & fixed line, I was given mystery. Sometimes, I wanted to give it all back, but to who, I wondered, & how? I wanted a life to come out of my life, but instead I was left with my life. All that wanting, I think now, & still I woke this morning to light & the memory of the time a bird did fly through the open window of my apartment, &, scared & senseless, shat all over the couch before leaving. All that wanting, right? Sometimes it happens & sometimes it doesn’t & sometimes it happens worse. Make do, little friend I call myself. Walk backward out of the room you have made out of your wanting into the room of where you are. The poem is here. The revolution, too. & love, still, even in the evening, when light still shines.

The poem is here. The revolution, too. & love,
still, even in the evening, when light still shines.
#SaturdayPoem

Why Whales Are Back in New York City Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Tumblr View print mode Rajiv Mohabir After a century, humpbacks migrate again to Queens. They left due to sewage and white froth banking the shores from polychlorinated- biphenyl-dumping into the Hudson and winnowing menhaden schools. But now grace, dark bodies of song return. Go to the seaside— Hold your breath. Submerge. A black fluke silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline. Now ICE beats doors down on Liberty Avenue to deport. I sit alone on orange A train seats, mouth sparkling from Singh’s, no matter how white supremacy gathers at the sidewalks, flows down the streets, we still beat our drums wild. Watch their false-god statues prostrate to black and brown hands. They won’t keep us out though they send us back. Our songs will pierce the dark fathoms. Behold the miracle: what was once lost now leaps before you.

no matter how
white supremacy gathers

at the sidewalks, flows down
the streets, we still beat our drums
wild

#SaturdayPoem

Kristin Lueke i ask the sun too much each plant i’ve kept alive so far i call my friend. each of my friends has its own quiet prayer, it’s called how i’d like to be cared for— for instance, from a distance, please & gently, within reach, without expectation but this— i will try to stay alive if you try to understand me. one is never not hungry for all my attention— the gift of you bending you backwards to please me. still another’s impossible, erratic at best & unwilling to clarify— you’ll just have to learn to learn what i want. what i want? is a room where the light finds me easy & all that we need, we have.

a room where the light finds me
easy & all that we need, we have.
#SaturdayPoem

Leila Chatti Walking through Provincetown in January, I Fall in Love Again with my life. The fleece of it draped silver midair. From the eaves of houses icicles dripping, keeping time with my pulse. (How could I have ever wanted to cut you out? Bluest ribbon of my blood looped around my wrist as if a finger, so as not to forget—) Through the haze, sun- break demanding as a child. Messy dayglow on slush, spilling everywhere like milk. I pause at the harbor, its broad clean slate. My cheeks red as the first day. My feet planted at the edge, lapped by swash like kisses.

icicles dripping, keeping
time with my pulse.
#SaturdayPoem

ONE LAST POEM FOR RICHARD December 24th and we’re through again. This time for good I know because I didn’t throw you out — and anyway we waved. No shoes. No angry doors. We folded clothes and went our separate ways. You left behind that flannel shirt of yours I liked but remembered to take your toothbrush. Where are you tonight? Richard, it’s Christmas Eve again and old ghosts come back home. I’m sitting by the Christmas tree wondering where did we go wrong. Okay, we didn’t work, and all memories to tell you the truth aren’t good. But sometimes there were good times. Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep beside me and never dreamed afraid. There should be stars for great wars like ours. There ought to be awards and plenty of champagne for the survivors. After all the years of degradations, the several holidays of failure, there should be something to commemorate the pain. Someday we’ll forget that great Brazil disaster. Till then, Richard, I wish you well. I wish you love affairs and plenty of hot water, and women kinder than I treated you. I forget the reason, but I loved you once, remember? Maybe in this season, drunk and sentimental, I’m willing to admit a part of me, crazed and kamikaze, ripe for anarchy, loves still. SANDRA CISNEROS

There should be stars for great wars
like ours. There ought to be awards
and plenty of champagne for the survivors.
#SaturdayPoem

What To Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back by Roseann Lloyd Find a clean cloth for the kitchen table, the red and blue one you made that cold winter in Montana. Spread out your paper and books. Tune the radio to the jazz station. Look at the bright orange safflowers you found last August— how well they've held their color next to the black-spotted cat. Make some egg coffee, in honor of all the people above the Arctic Circle. Give thanks to the Sufis, who figured out how to brew coffee from the dark, bitter beans. Remark on the joyfulness of your dishes: black and yellow stars. Reminisce with your lover about the history of this kitchen where, between bites of cashew stir fry, you first kissed each other on the mouth. Now that you're hungry, toast some leftover cornbread, spread it with real butter, honey from bees that fed on basswood blossoms. The window is frosted over, but the sun's casting an eye over all the books. Open your Spanish book. The season for sleeping is over. The pots and pans: quiet now, let them be. It will be a short day. Sit in the kitchen as long as you can, reading and writing. At sundown, rub a smidgen of butter on the western windowsill to ask the sun: Come back again tomorrow. "What To Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back" by Roseann Lloyd, from Because of the Light. © Holy Cow! Press, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

ask the sun:
come back again tomorrow
#SaturdayPoem

Bob HicokGoing Big For Hanukkah, for my wife, I tried putting candles on the antlers of deer. It’s not that I believe in God: I believe in light, and deer, and a man pulling his weight in the adaptation of the species. I believe antlers the most natural menorah, in a twelve point buck glowing in falling snow, in hunters dropping their rifles to their sides, in the cool air cupping our faces in its hands. To say it didn’t work is to miss that I got to know how to wait for deer, which is different than waiting for bear, or love, or a phrase of sufficient tenderness to capture the evanescence of life to arrive, and last beyond the feeling nothing lasts. Light lasts. Light runs and runs without tiring or giving up, the universe is bigger now, and now, and now, just as intimacy grows when my wife lights candles with a scarf over her head, holds her hands up to the light while repeating a prayer repeated millions of times, adding to the distance the words have traveled and the complicated life they’ve lived, and better still, reminding me there’s a bloom in her face only I can see in this light, so yes, I know what luck is.

It’s not that I believe in God:
I believe in light, and deer
#SaturdayPoem

Amanda Maret Scharf We got the dog to get us out of bed, out of the house, to stop our unhealthy relationship with Petfinder, Adopt-a-Pet, and Craigslist but not to stop our imagined lives, the endless scroll of Redfin, Zillow, and Trulia. Location: unaffordable. View: Impossible. To go to puppy school on Sundays, where the trainer says Sit, No, Break. Says I love you guys, but you two are so gay. We got the dog to teach us patience, perspective, because when I get sad I get sad. To mop the kitchen with her snout. Here, I point, and here: the floorboards, my toes, the couch. Now, I drop crumbs without caring, and you write her name into songs about the sun. So that we can say we live here. After our neighbors had a baby. After my cousin had a baby. After they had another baby and named me godmother. We got the dog to say I love you. So that you could ask her on the kitchen floor if she remembers her mother, which makes me think of yours in the gold frame by your side of the bed, except hers is living somewhere on a farm in Tennessee. So we could say ridiculous things like look at her breathing! To say look at us. To say she looks like you. So I can tell you no, clearly, she has your eyes.

We got the dog to say I love you.
#SaturdayPoem

Slant By Suji Kwock Kim If the angle of an eye is all, the slant of hope, the slant of dreaming, according to each life, what is the light of this city, light of Lady Liberty, possessor of the most famous armpit in the world, light of the lovers on Chinese soap operas, throwing BBQ’d ducks at each other with that live-it-up-while-you’re-young, Woo Me kind of love, light of the old men sitting on crates outside geegaw shops selling dried seahorses & plastic Temples of Heaven, light of the Ying ‘n’ Yang Junk Palace, light of the Golden Phoenix Hair Salon, light of Wig-o-ramas, light of the suntanners in Central Park turning over like rotisserie chickens sizzling on a spit, light of the Pluck U & Gone with the Wings fried-chicken shops, the parking-meter-leaners, the Glamazons, the oglers wearing fern-wilting quantities of cologne, strutting, trash-talking, glorious: the immigrants, the refugees, the peddlars, stockbrokers and janitors, stenographers and cooks, all of us making and unmaking ourselves, hurrying forwards, toward who we’ll become, one way only, one life only: free in time but not from it, here in the city the living make together, and make and unmake over and over Quick, quick, ask heaven of it, of every mortal relation, feeling that is fleeing, for what would the heart be without a heaven to set it on? I can’t help thinking no word will ever be as full of life as this world, I can’t help thinking of thanks.

free in time but not from it,
here in the city the living make together, and make and unmake over and over

#SaturdayPoem

Jeremy Radin Evening Another word I love is evening for the balance it implies, balance being something I struggle with. I suppose I would like to be more a planet, turning in & out of light It comes down again to polarities, equilibrium. Evening. The moths take the place of the butterflies, owls the place of hawks, coyotes for dogs, stillness for business, & the great sorrow of brightness makes way for its own sorrow. Everything dances with its strict negation, & I like that. I have no choice but to like that. Systems are evening out all around us— even now, as we kneel before a new & ruthless circumstance. Where would I like to be in five years, someone asks—& what can I tell them? Surrendering with grace to the evening, with as much grace as I can muster to the circumstance of darkness, which is only something else that does not stay.

Where would I like to be in five
years, someone asks—& what
can I tell them?
#SaturdayPoem

Mickie Kennedy Finding My Boyfriend in Bed with a Stranger, 1993 A safety pin through the guy's ear catching light. His hair dyed black, his ass barely there, frenetically pumping. Beneath him, you looked gorgeous. Lacquered in sweat. Eyes shut. Feet hooked around his bony neck, so lost you didn't see me by the window. Everything you did was beautiful, even betrayal. Your lips quivering, as if you were reciting a private rosary. Even then, I knew I wanted to remember you like that--face slack, no guilt, no fear. So soon we'd be checking our mouths for sores.

Everything you did was beautiful,

even betrayal.

#SaturdayPoem

Mary Ruefle Kiss of the Sun If, as they say, poetry is a sign of something among people, then let this be prearranged now, between us, while we are still peoples: that at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry (and wheat and evil and insects and love), when the entire human race gathers in the flesh, reconstituted down to the infant's tiniest fold and littlest nail, I will be standing at the edge of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you, reconstituted down to its innermost seed protected by white thread, in case you are thirsty, which does not at this time seem like such a wild guess, and though there will be no poetry between us then, at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas, I hope you will take it, and remember on earth I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw, and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd or anything else so that I am of it, I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.

at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry
(and wheat and evil and insects and love),
#SaturdayPoem

Reasons to Survive November Tony Hoagland November like a train wreck— as if a locomotive made of cold had hurtled out of Canada and crashed into a million trees, flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire. The sky is a thick, cold gauze— but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown, and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum, full of luminous red barns. —Or maybe I’ll visit beautiful Donna, the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe, and roll around in her foldout bed. I know there are some people out there who think I am supposed to end up in a room by myself with a gun and a bottle full of hate, a locked door and my slack mouth open like a disconnected phone. But I hate those people back from the core of my donkey soul and the hatred makes me strong and my survival is their failure, and my happiness would kill them so I shove joy like a knife into my own heart over and over and I force myself toward pleasure, and I love this November life where I run like a train deeper and deeper into the land of my enemies.

my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over
#SaturdayPoem

Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem Bob Hicok My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so. Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish at the same time. I think praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think staying up and waiting for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this is exactly what’s happening, it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics of mournful Whistlers, the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge. I like the idea of different theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass, a Bronx where people talk like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow kind, perhaps in the nook of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed anyone. Here I have two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back to rest my cheek against, your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish. My hands are webbed like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed something in the womb but couldn’t hang on. One of those other worlds or a life I felt passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother’s belly she had to scream out. Here, when I say I never want to be without you, somewhere else I am saying I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you in each of the places we meet, in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying and resurrected. When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life, in each place and forever.

Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook
of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed
anyone.

#SaturdayPoem

Padraig Regan A Pumpkin With effort I get the knife in, & with a little hinging of the wrist, I split the fruit along a shallow runnel where its form suggests it wants to split. It exposes its creamy interior. Its flesh, like all flesh, is a distraction; it wraps around an orange mess of filaments. I scoop this out, I pull each pale seed from its entanglement. & because I want a violence more intimate, I do this with my hands & feel its wet potential turn to pulp beneath my nails. By now the fruit is more the absence of itself: an orange cup enclosing what it’s lost. There are many things I should confess. To begin with: this vicious sympathy, this want (& inability) to know how it feels to hold a space at the centre oneself, & have it filled; to bend the self around the presence of something not-quite-other, not-quite-I; to give the body up as nourishment. I cut the pumpkin’s two bright domes to crescent moons. I do this in the hope that when the resurrection comes, everything I have subjected thus will be returned inviolate & I’ll be nothing & forgiven.

I pull each pale seed from its entanglement.
& because I want a violence
more intimate, I do this with my hands
#SaturdayPoem

You know what, I'm traveling and don't feel like trying to get my gigantic master document of poetry to load on my phone to pick one and also my head hurts, so how about for this week's #SaturdayPoem we flip and you all link me some of YOUR favorite poems. Go.

Equinox by Barbara Crooker Another October. The maples have done their slick trick of turning yellow almost overnight; summer’s hazy skies are cobalt blue. My friend has come in from the West, where it’s been a year of no mercy: chemotherapy, bone marrow transplant, more chemotherapy, and her hair came out in fistfuls, twice. Bald as a pumpkin. And then, the surgeon’s knife. But she’s come through it all, annealed by fire, calm settled in her bones like the morning mist in valleys and low places, and her hair’s returned, glossy as a horse chestnut kept in a shirt pocket. Today a red fox ran down through the corn stubble; he vanished like smoke. I want to praise things that cannot last. The scarlet and orange leaves are already gone, blown down by a cold rain, crushed and trampled. They rise again in leaf meal and wood smoke. The Great Blue Heron’s returned to the pond, settles in the reeds like a steady flame. Geese cut a wedge out of the sky, drag the gray days behind them like a skein of old wool. I want to praise everything brief and finite. Overhead, the Pleiades fall into place; Orion rises. Great Horned Owls muffle the night with their calls; night falls swiftly, tucking us in her black velvet robe, the stitches showing through, all those little lights, our little lives, rising and falling.

night falls swiftly, tucking us in her black velvet robe,
the stitches showing through
#SaturdayPoem

Actually, we're upping this one again for this week's #SaturdayPoem - we're a few days off but close enough. <3

I will round up a few of the ones I love that are too long to use in #SaturdayPoem posts but you’ll find a lot of my shorter faves there. (And if you REALLY want some poems I can DM you my poetry master file.)

“Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness” by Franny Choi Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life. The day A. died, the sun was brighter than any sun. I answered the phone, and a channel opened between my stupid head and heaven, or what was left of it. The blankness stared back; and I made sound after sound with my blood-wet gullet. O unsayable—O tender and divine unsayable, I knew you then: you line straight to the planet’s calamitous core; you moment moment moment; you intimate abyss I called sister for a good reason. When the Bad Thing happened, I saw every blade. And every year I find out what they’ve done to us, I shed another skin. I get closer to open air; true north. Lord, if I say Bless the cold water you throw on my face, does that make me a costume party. Am I greedy for comfort if I ask you not to kill my friends; if I beg you to press your heel against my throat—not enough to ruin me, but just so—just so I can almost see your face—

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
#SaturdayPoem

Caylin Capra-Thomas Lightning Suspected in Death of Horses I want to take you to the black-mud spring pasture where six horses fell and did not get back up. I don’t know if they were dark or dappled— I wasn’t there. I read it in a newspaper in Vermont, sitting at the counter of a diner that no longer exists. Lightning Suspected in Deaths of Horses— small article in a bottom corner, not much more information than that. It struck me— I’m not trying to be funny—I carried that headline around until it became a slogan, although I’m not sure what I’d been sold. Maybe this: the sky opens, you kneel and beg its mercy, and it doesn’t make one lick of difference. Or maybe, light appears and your life is transformed. Finally getting exactly what you asked for all along: a shift in luck, sudden brilliance, your body lit, electric, your own enough to let it go.

Maybe this: the sky opens, you kneel
and beg its mercy

#SaturdayPoem