a word after a word after a word is power

"Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay." Janet Fitch, White Oleander a poetry appreciation blog

[buttonpoetry]

claimed property by Aly Acevedo, from her book My Dear Cult Leader.

[metamorphesque]

'things there are no words for, but should be', tatheve simonyan

[strangerconnection]

you know, i don't remember

[metamorphesque]

'things there are no words for, but should be', tatheve simonyan

[apoemaday]

The Zen of La Llorona

by Deborah Miranda

La Llorona rises over my town -- a solitary curve, sharpened by someone else’s fury. I read a small gray Zen book Everyone loses everything. Lovers, families, friends, possessions, egos -- we keep nothing of this world, not even our bodies. It’s as if you’d lost your favorite teacup, you see. No amount of searching, weeping or wailing will bring it back. If you want a drink, use a different container. Write a long series of passionate poems about your cup. Hell, write a whole book. Obsession is the mother of creation. But as you compose, sip from the new mug. It will become your mug of choice. You’ll lose that one, too. And so on. In theory, anyway, we outlast dispossession: Ceramic mugs, hearts, continents. Outside, La Llorona’s knife slices the indigo heart of silence. Nonsense, she howls. There’s always something left to lose.

[apoemaday]

Eve Argues Against Perfection

by Diane Lockward

And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. -- Genesis 3:13 Beguiled, my ass. I said no such thing. You say I lost the gift of Paradise. I couldn’t lose what I never had. You say the serpent tempted me to eat. You omit that he entered the Garden on two legs and walked like a man. And here’s what your story always ignores: I had pure gold, rare perfume, precious stones, but Adam hadn’t touched me all those years. Perfection in the Garden didn’t mean that way. Not having it and not wanting it was God’s idea of perfection, not mine. So when that serpent strolled up to the tree, all upright and fine, he threw off the balance, and I began to pray, Oh, let him be mine. When he held out the apple, so round and lush, when he stroked it to a keen red glow, I didn’t fall to temptation -- I rose to it. I ate that apple because I was hungry. I wanted what lay outside of Paradise, a world without the burden of perfection. Now you call all sinful women my sisters. I say, let them claim their own damn sins. The apple may not be perfect, but it’s mine.

[carfuckerlynch]

hey does anyone have that poem. about the author seeing two boys cuddling on a hotel lobby couch, where he refers to it as something like an island of safe anonymity or smth. its been 5000 years my college boyfriend had it written out and pinned to his wall

[carfuckerlynch]

THANK YOU @witchoflight it is indeed "on traveling together" by Kayleb Rae Candrilli

[havingapoemwithyou]

I THINK LOVE IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS TO OTHER PEOPLE by Michael Gray Bulla

[abutchrambling]

@ butchmonologues on instagram

[rotgospels]

Mary Karr, “VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God” 

[glassheartedboy]

A Yeshiva Education

The things I have learned in Hebrew school: 1. This is the Alef-Bet in Hebrew. It is your people’s tongue. It is sweet on yours. 2. They want to kill you 3. This is what you say when they accuse you of killing their god 4. This is what you say when they accuse you of controlling the government 5. The Mishnah has six books, arranged by subject. 6. This is how to hide a kippah in public 7. There are two main commentaries on the Gemara on every Talmud page- Rashi and Tosafot 8. They killed your family 9. This is the prayer for the anniversary of a death 10. This is how to feel afraid 11. This is how to feel ashamed of being afraid 12. Do not read “children”, read “builders” 13. Your children will be afraid of building a life anywhere they cannot flee from at midnight 14. This is how to feel anger 15. This is how to choke 16. On it 17. It back 18. When you are dying 19. When they are killing you 20. Say the shema

@glassheartedboy

[ironedorchid]

Kelly Link, 21st April 2026

[iirulancorrino]

Citizen Illegal, José Olivarez

[oneawkwardcookie]

[image description: screenshot of the poem Mexican American Disambiguation, from José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal

Mexican American Disambiguation

after Idris Goodwin

my parents are Mexican who are not to be confused with Mexican Americans or Chicanos. i am a Chicano from Chicago which means i am a Mexican American with a fancy college degree & a few tattoos. my parents are Mexican who are not to be confused with Mexicans still living in México. those Mexicans call themselves mexicanos. white folks at parties call them pobrecitos. American colleges call them international students & diverse. my mom was white in México & my dad was mestizo & after they crossed the border they became diverse. & minorities. & ethnic. & exotic. but my parents call themselves mexicanos, who, again, should not be confused for mexicanos living in México, those mexicanos might call my family gringos, which is the word my family calls white folks & white folks call my parents interracial. colleges say put them on a brochure. my parents say que significa esa palabra, i point out that all the men in my family marry lighter-skinned women. that’s the Chicano in me. which means it’s the fancy college degrees in me, which is also diverse of me. everything in me is diverse even when i eat American foods like hamburgers, which, to clarify, are American when a white person eats them & diverse when my family eats them. so much of America can be understood like this. my parents were undocumented when they came to this country & by undocumented, i mean sin papeles, & by sin papeles, i mean royally fucked, which should not be confused with the American Dream though the two are cousins. colleges are not looking for undocumented diversity. my dad became a citizen which should not be confused with keys to the house. we were safe from deportation, which should not be confused with walking the plank, though they’re cousins. i call that sociology, but that’s just the Chicano in me, who should not be confused with the diversity in me or the mexicano in me who is constantly fighting with the upwardly mobile in me who is good friends with the Mexican American in me, who the colleges love, but only on brochures, who the government calls NON-WHITE, HISPANIC or WHITE, HISPANIC, who my parents call mijo even when i don’t come home so much.

/end ID]

[halogen2]

I THINK LOVE IS SOMETHING / THAT HAPPENS TO OTHER PEOPLE

[notquiteaghost]

like winning the lottery / or finding God in your sock drawer. I think love is something that happens to other people—nebulous, distant, an invention of the movies; I think love is like death / as in, it happens to everyone but you until it happens / to you, and then where else could you be but in love? Where else could you be but in the belly of the beast, / that oozing cavern where people go in fairy tales? I think love is a creation. I think maybe you shape it with your hands, I think maybe you find it stuck in your molars, I think maybe it comes to you when you’re in the shower, your face tilted towards the water while your mind melts somewhere else, I think maybe we’ve all been naming it wrong. You know that love? That falling-to-your-knees love? That where’d-the-water-go love? That hold-me-close-I’ll-never-leave-I-know-your-favorite- coffee-creamer love? That what-we-talk-about-when-we- talk-about-love love? You ever felt that? I mean, really felt any of that? / Yeah, tell me again how you feel it. Yeah, tell me again / how it fills the chest, fills the head, fills the lungs. Tell me again what it means to find God in your sock drawers. Tell me again.

[sashayed]

They Killed Cows. I Killed Them.

In the future we might all be vegetarian, and this life will seem barbaric the way a corset was or eugenics. We might look at this man being secretly recorded, bragging, They killed cows, I killed them, and wonder, where was his mother? She might have spoken of his childhood, how it was poor but decent, how like that blue god’s mother she too gaped into her son’s wide gob and saw the universe once. Or she might have told the story of how he was led astray by a band of men in uniforms. Not brownshirts but pleated brownshorts in which they practiced ideological calisthenics. How she’s been standing at the crater’s edge saying, Here, kitty kitty kitty, ever since. Because this man, her son in the undershirt, dear cadre, cow vigilante, he’s no gladiolus. He sighs. Even his mustache is pusillanimous. Maybe he was a Romeo in school. Maybe he wields this stick to reclaim what he misses most about his body, or maybe it’s always been his dream to squeeze the messy limbs of this country into a svelte operatic shriek. The camera gives us a glimpse of his chin dumpling. He will go to jail a thousand times without passing go, without stopping to plant a tree or collect clean underwear. He admits it was wrong to allow his boys to record the killing. Jai Shri Ram. Silly to leave evidence behind, even though they always go free, even though the young lads enjoy it so. And Qasim? The man they killed, the green meadow of his life come to this, didn’t his mother also once confuse the dirt in his mouth for a galaxy? Didn’t he believe a dying man had the right to ask for water? In the future when people complain about how Gandhi should have made a comeback, when comparisons are drawn between YouTube and the Upanishads, will they notice the bystanders in the frame, their shabby shoes shuffling like lapwings around the bloody censored blur of Qasim’s body? Will they speak of the difficulty of watching him thrash around for an invisible rope to steady him home, the difficulty of us watching them watching him being killed? Or is that an illusion too? The way a magician might swirl his cape to reveal his assistant is really a robot. No damage done here, folks! The way we enter the rooms of our past like gunshots to say, Surprise, I’m still here. No point carrying blossoms in your pocket instead of a meat sandwich. Because even if you did not walk the earth exultantly, even if you avoided disposable plates and mourned every glacier and strung a lattice of pearls to the giant monument of love, there might still come a day when you are hauling refrigerators on a truck, or taking the children to a fair, and when death arrives you must let him strap you to a telephone pole, you must look into his ten-headed face, and say,  Flay, brother, flay.

Tishani Doshi in Poetry, April 2020

[carfuckerlynch]

hey does anyone have that poem. about the author seeing two boys cuddling on a hotel lobby couch, where he refers to it as something like an island of safe anonymity or smth. its been 5000 years my college boyfriend had it written out and pinned to his wall

[carfuckerlynch]

THANK YOU @witchoflight it is indeed "on traveling together" by Kayleb Rae Candrilli

[april-is]

April 3, 2026: Poetry, Diane Seuss

Poetry Diane Seuss

There’s no sense in telling you my particular troubles. You have yours too. Is there value in comparing notes? Unlike Williams writing poems on prescription pads between patients, I have no prescriptions for you. I’m more interested in the particular nature and tenor of the energy of our trouble. Maybe that’s not enough for you. Sometimes I stick in some music. I’m capable of hallucination so there’s nothing wrong with my images. As for me, I’m not looking for wisdom. The wise don’t often write wisely, do they? The danger is in teetering into platitudes. Maybe Keats was preternaturally wise but what he gave us was beauty, whatever that is, and truth, synonymous, he wrote, with beauty, and not the same as wisdom. Maybe truth is the raw material of wisdom before it has been conformed by ego, fear, and time, like a shot of whiskey without embellishment, or truth lays bare the broken bone and wisdom scurries in, wanting to cover and justify it. It’s really kind of a nasty enterprise. Who wants anyone else’s hands on their pain? And I’d rather be arrested than advised, even on my taxes. So what can poetry be now? Dangerous to approach such a question, and difficult to find the will to care. But we must not languish, soldiers, (according to the wise,) we must go so far as to invent new mechanisms of caring. Maybe truth, yes, delivered with clarity. The tone is up to you. Truth, unabridged, has become in itself a strange and beautiful thing. Truth may involve a degree of seeing through time. Even developing a relationship with a thing before writing, whether a bird or an idea about birds, it doesn’t matter. But please not only a picture of a bird. Err on the side of humility, though humility can be declarative. It does not submit. It can even appear audacious. It takes mettle to propose truth and pretend it is generalizable. Truth should sting, in its way, like a major bee, not a sweat bee. It may target the reader like an arrow, or be swallowable, a watermelon seed we feared as children would take up residency in our guts and grow unabated and change us forever into something viny and prolific and terrible. As for beauty, a problematic word, one to be side-eyed lest it turn you to stone or salt, it is not something to work on but a biproduct, at times, of the process of our making. Beauty comes or it doesn’t, as do its equally compelling counterparts, inelegance and vileness. This we learned from Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, Genet, male poets of the lavishly grotesque. You’ve seen those living rooms, the red velvet walls and lampshades fringed gold, cat hair thick on the couches, and you have been weirdly compelled, even cushioned, by them. Either way, please don’t tell me flowers are beautiful and blood clots are ugly. These things I know, or I know this is how flowers and blood clots are assessed by those content with stale orthodoxies. Maybe there is such a thing as the beauty of drawing near. Near, nearer, all the way to the bedside of the dying world. To sit in witness, without platitudes, no matter the distortions of the death throes, no matter the awful music of the rattle. Close, closer, to that sheeted edge. From this vantage point poetry can still be beautiful. It can even be useful, though never wise.

----

Every time I read this, I find a new favorite line. (I was going to send it on the 15th, American tax day, as a little joke around "I’d rather be arrested / than advised, even on my / taxes," but I couldn't wait.)

Wander the echoing halls of the poems sent on this day in...

2025: On the Origin of Trans Femmes, Kai Cheng Thom 2024: Positivity, D.A. Powell 2023: Picture This, Jiordan Castle 2022: Alba, Madeleine Cravens 2021: July, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz 2020: Poem Beginning With A Retweet, Maggie Smith 2019: Waiting for Happiness, Nomi Stone 2018: United, Naomi Shihab Nye 2017: If You Are Over Staying Woke, Morgan Parker 2016: High School Senior, Sharon Olds 2015: Dog in Bed, Joyce Sidman 2014: Persephone Writes to Her Mother, Tara Mae Mulroy 2013: Hook, James Wright 2012: How to Build an Owl, Kathleen Lynch 2011: Expecting, Kevin Young 2010: The Choir, Luke Kennard 2009: I Come Home Wanting To Touch Everyone, Stephen Dunn 2008: Visible World, Richard Siken 2007: Anywhere Else, Maggie Dietz 2006: After Work, Richard Jones 2005: The Sheep-Child, James Dickey