My Crush Walked into the Library with a Woman on His Arm and I Almost Lost My 4-Year Chip Over It
Saturday, January 25, 2025
My Crush Walked into the Library with a Woman on His Arm and I Almost Lost My 4-Year Chip Over It by Nicholas Goodly
Thursday, January 23, 2025
Vigil by Camille Rankine
Vigil
Long day’s night, the endless dream.
Hot night on the veranda, frog chirp, cicada scream.
Sharp night, a naked light, your voice come back over and over.
Howl shaking loose night’s woven threads.
Dog day’s night, cloudburst, rumble.
Night lifts its head.
Sloe night, lip sweat, steeped indigo.
Bright night’s incessant afterglow, and the day won’t take me back.
Twilight, not awake, not asleep.
Night the sky collapsed.
Solstice night hour after hour.
Waking and it’s still night:
Quarter to three, night’s heavy limb across my chest.
Night closing its capacious robes over me.
Unremembered night, the night I loved you best.
Nightingale’s song, your damp curls against my neck.
Night they put you in my arms.
That winter night, the early dark, your breath marking the air.
Night’s whispered name.
Night of helicopter’s drone and a punishing rain.
Night’s redaction, and a home turns ash and grave.
Watchful night, hand in hand, faraway pinprick of flame.
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
The Courtesy of the Blind by Wisława Szymborska
The Courtesy of the Blind
The poet reads his lines to the blind.
He hadn’t guessed that it would be so hard.
His voice trembles.
His hands shake.
He senses that every sentence
is put to the test of darkness.
He must muddle through alone,
without colors or lights.
A treacherous endeavor
for his poems’ stars,
dawns, rainbows, clouds, their neon lights, their moon,
for the fish so silvery thus far beneath the water
and the hawk so high and quiet in the sky.
He reads—since it’s too late to stop now—
about the boy in a yellow jacket on a green field,
red roofs that can be counted in the valley,
the restless numbers on soccer players’ shirts,
and the naked stranger standing in a half-shut door.
He’d like to skip—although it can’t be done—
all the saints on that cathedral ceiling,
the parting wave from a train,
the microscope lens, the ring casting a glow,
the movie screens, the mirrors, the photo albums.
But great is the courtesy of the blind,
great is their forbearance, their largesse.
They listen, smile, and applaud.
One of them even comes up
with a book turned wrongside out
asking for an unseen autograph.
(Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak)
Wednesday, January 8, 2025
We skip school to listen by KB Brookins
We skip school to listen
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
Land’s End by Malachi Black
Land’s End
Sunday, January 5, 2025
A Violet Darkness by Najwan Darwish
A Violet Darkness
And all that remains for me is to follow a violet darkness
on soil where myths splinter and crack.
Yes, love was time, and it too
splintered and cracked
like the face of our country.
My share of the people
is the transit of their ghosts.
(Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid)
Saturday, January 4, 2025
A Sunset by Robert Hass
A Sunset
The sky tonight on the top of the ridge
Was bruise-colored, a yellow-brown
That is one definition of the word “sordid,”
Which, I think, used to describe
That color, carries neither a moral
Nor an aesthetic judgment. The sky
At dusk was sordid and then brightened
And softened to a glowing peach
Of brief but astonishing beauty,
If you happened to be paying attention.
I could take a hard right here
To the angry adolescent boy in Texas
Who shot and killed nineteen children
With a high-powered weapon my culture
Put into his hands. How to enter
The hive of that mind and undo what
The imagination had done there?
He wore a flak jacket, bought two rifles
At a local store, one of which fires forty rounds
A minute. He had it specifically in mind
To kill children of that age, the lithe-
Bodied young in their end-of-term clothing.
The connective tissue in this veering
Is the idea that it is the experience of beauty,
Not rules, not fear of consequences
Or reverence for authority, that informs
Our moral sense. This may be where
John Ashbery would introduce a non sequitur,
Not from aversion to responsibility
But from a sense he no doubt had
That there was a kind of self-importance
In the introduction of morality to poetry
And that one might, therefore, be better off
Practicing one’s art in more or less
The spirit of the poor juggler in the story
Of Christmas who, having no gift to bring
To the infant god, crept into the church
In the night and faced the crèche and juggled.