nectarine
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I forgot forget
amnesia
was lost to me
then a smooth
fur-free fruit
unnamed for days
until I found it
ripe
on my tongue
This is a small poetry club that started as a poetry email exchange between two friends. Our goal is to read a poem everyday, and this blog is one way to help keep us accountable. There is only one valid rule in poetry club: there are no rules in poetry club. Read any poem, in any order, with any or no interactions. You decide. We only suggest you read poetry!
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30 Mar: "Inventory for Spring" by Wendy Xu
Inventory for Spring
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BY WENDY XU
Feeling rich for one moment for using money as a bookmark
Feeling deceitful for making public some opinions while neglecting others
Feeling disordered at the sight of three statues conspiring in a row
Feeling insufficient for having a lukewarm reaction to news
Feeling important for having been offered a seat at the table
Feeling apologetic for nonetheless tuning out an argument
Feeling blue for identifying some people who don’t respect you
Feeling like a knife slipping into a pool of water for bearing
disagreement
Feeling redundant for moving in a similar direction as others
Feeling angry for imagining the opening of the passage yet
unopened for you
Feeling antisocial for declining further missives from home
29 Mar: "She Longed to be an Island" by Marjorie Agosin
She longed to be an island
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TRANSLATED BY JACQUELINE NANFITO
She longed to be an island,
She loved the unbridled madness of them, the islands,
She longed to arrive to an island that, perhaps, wasn't an island
Divest herself of the ruinous, stony loves
She longed to be an island
To only inhabit the sea's waistline
And not leave or return
To only be an island
Island of the night
Island of the dawn
Islands.
28 Mar: "The Interchangeable World of the Micronauts" by Raymond McDaniel
The Interchangeable World of the Micronauts
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What half-blind is like:
like two microscopes in my head
each with differently stuck objectives.
They enable the small and the very small
and reduce everything else to blur and shade.
Yet you can train even this.
Train it to spot the shape of sharks’ teeth,
of which there are many samples and many shapes
but not as many as flecks of sand, pieces of shell.
I have hundreds plucked from the shore.
But in the same beach I buried a toy
and never found it again. A tiny toy:
articulate, a translucent man, a smallness
to whom the world was an unbounded wonder.
Blemished and damaged I would hold him up
and say He is broken and anyone who could see
would say He looks fine to me.
But they can see well, not finely.
Look at his face, etched and serrated
by that gargantuan saw.
The cracked shell of his translucent skin,
buried in rubble now, and those teeth,
all that remain of terrible and invisible jaws.
27 Mar: "Kettle to Pot" by Simone White
Kettle to Pot
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BY SIMONE WHITE
Unable to pour boiling water
over an edge from kettle to pot
water boils from kettle to neti pot
still boils from kettle to cup running over
boil pool steam pool leak pool
little cooling pot over the boiled edge
of boil pooled salt vapors
sulfurous stank boil heal dangled over
the boiled edge of burnt earth
cooling salt pool nettle stung
black clotted blood at the bottom
of the sink
26 Mar: "She Spent a Year Hallucinating Birds" by Jill Alexander Essbaum
She Spent a Year Hallucinating Birds
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They perched on roofs and fences and sills. They posed statue-still on catenary lines. They aligned along cables like prayer beads on rope. They amassed en masse on the cemetery lawn and marauded the broad, yawning fields like cattle. Their cackles were black. Each shadow dove and pecked. They nested in chimneys and chirped at the chime of the church bell. They worked in shifts. Clocked out at odd hours. They laid their eggs in the Vs of trees. They teemed on the dry-baked banks of creek beds, streams the sun had overseen. They teetered on the bed-knob tops of flagpoles. They pitched like pennies into founts. They pitched like babies into wells. They thumped at doors then skulked away like hoodlum teens. They jabbed her. When she cried they did it faster. Everyone knows what happened next. Some grew big as sunflower stalks, others tall like bonfire flames. Or moving vans. Or the sick, brick houses people die inside of every night. Their hatchlings canopied the sky. Was it her fault, then, when they pinned her to the ground and thrust their feathers down her throat? Or wormed between her legs in bad-man ways? Or rattled plumes and whooped and beat her body with their wings? Or locked their talons to her thighs and tra-la-la-ed that ditty from the old-time music box? Or forced their whiskies past her lips? Or put her in the pillory? This was foreplay, in a way. They rolled in rabid packs and woofed like dogs. She couldn’t throw a bone. The meat was gone. They chased her and they named her and they boiled her tears and bathed her. Then they ate her.
25 Mar: "A Peaceful Contradiction" by Iain Britton
A Peaceful Contradiction
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BY IAIN BRITTON
from the 4 corners of this tower lumped on a map
the best magician wins the day / thinks
he’s invisible / white rabbits hide in cupboards
in boxes in hats / a peaceful contradiction exists /
a plan for a park a plantation for immaculate thoughts
for flower beds which eat fragrances all year round /
from this monolithic inheritance avenues spoke outwards
to capture returning prodigals / ancestral
dropouts / the multiple births of children
the sun’s last sentence of the day
24 Mar: "Somewhere or Other" by Christina Rossetti
Somewhere or Other
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Somewhere or other there must surely be
The face not seen, the voice not heard,
The heart that not yet—never yet—ah me!
Made answer to my word.
Somewhere or other, may be near or far;
Past land and sea, clean out of sight;
Beyond the wandering moon, beyond the star
That tracks her night by night.
Somewhere or other, may be far or near;
With just a wall, a hedge, between;
With just the last leaves of the dying year
Fallen on a turf grown green.
23 Mar: "I'll Open the Window" by Anna Sir
I’ll Open the Window
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BY ANNA SWIR
Our embrace lasted too long.
We loved right down to the bone.
I hear the bones grind, I see
our two skeletons.
Now I am waiting
till you leave, till
the clatter of your shoes
is heard no more. Now, silence.
Tonight I am going to sleep alone
on the bedclothes of purity.
Aloneness
is the first hygienic measure.
Aloneness
will enlarge the walls of the room,
I will open the window
and the large, frosty air will enter,
healthy as tragedy.
Human thoughts will enter
and human concerns,
misfortune of others, saintliness of others.
They will converse softly and sternly.
Do not come anymore.
I am an animal
very rarely.
22 Mar: "Flirtation" by Rita Dove
Flirtation
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BY RITA DOVE
After all, there’s no need
to say anything
at first. An orange, peeled
and quartered, flares
like a tulip on a wedgewood plate
Anything can happen.
Outside the sun
has rolled up her rugs
and night strewn salt
across the sky. My heart
is humming a tune
I haven’t heard in years!
Quiet’s cool flesh—
let’s sniff and eat it.
There are ways
to make of the moment
a topiary
so the pleasure’s in
walking through.
21 Mar: "Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room" by Victoria Chang
While the man is away
telling his wife
about the red-corseted woman,
the woman waits
on the queen-sized bed.
You'd expect her quiet
in the fist of a copper
statue. Half her face,
a shade of golden meringue,
the other half, the dark
of cattails. Her mouth even—
too straight, as if she doubted
her made decision, the way
women do. In her hands,
a yellow letter creased,
like her hunched back.
Her dress limp on a green chair.
In front, a man's satchel
and briefcase. On a dresser,
a hat with a ceylon
feather. That is all
the artist left us with,
knowing we would turn
the woman's stone into ours,
a thirst for the self
in everything—even
in the sweet chinks
20 Mar: "The Poet as Setting" by Douglas Kearney
The Poet as Setting
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The jolt that comes to bones inside a tumbled streetcar
is what the painter considers as she strokes her-
self into story. There is less to the jolt that
comes as he shuts his eyes before the monitor, save
what he imagines—a lightning bolt, a god tapping
the shoulder. He imagines the sky swelling
with ceiling fans or the guano of extinct birds,
a jolt riding from his shoulder
blades to his eyelids, dropping with roller
coaster clacks to his fingers. Here, he dreams of Frida
Kahlo. Here, he says, let me spread my flesh out like a
table linen, let my bones be silver that touches,
making, again, that clack. My skull will be a glass,
set properly, I have class enough. What jolt is
it to chew over class, his body set before him as
a reader sips (perhaps) a glass of something heady? We give
books spines, we break them. The table will have
its legs, its head. The body is upon us. Does the table have
a stomach? Is it simply there to bear our hunger
without its own, like a eunuch bathing a stripper?
What is the poet without eyes or ears—reading, listening? He is
a platform—a place to set, that to set it with. And if this is
all, what will he do when the reader finishes a glass,
rises from the poet’s head, and passes
into the city? Covered with a linen, he is waiting for
something to spill, perhaps a girl in Mexico rolling
her ankle in a street-
car.
19 Mar: "The New Experience" by Suzanne Buffam
The New Experience
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I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields.
From a distance some appeared to be smoldering
But when I approached with my hat in my hands
They let out small puffs of smoke and expired.
Through the windows of houses I saw lives lit up
With the otherworldly glow of TV
And these were smoking a little bit too.
I flew to Rome. I flew to Greece.
I sat on a rock in the shade of the Acropolis
And conjured dusky columns in the clouds.
I watched waves lap the crumbling coast.
I heard wind strip the woods.
I saw the last living snow leopard
Pacing in the dirt. Experience taught me
That nothing worth doing is worth doing
For the sake of experience alone.
I bit into an apple that tasted sweetly of time.
The sun came out. It was the old sun
With only a few billion years left to shine.
18 Mar: "The Luggage" by Constance Urdang
The Luggage
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Travel is a vanishing act
Only to those who are left behind.
What the traveler knows
Is that he accompanies himself,
Unwieldy baggage that can’t be checked,
Stolen, or lost, or mistaken.
So one took, past outposts of empire,
“Calmly as if in the British Museum,”
Not only her Victorian skirts,
Starched shirtwaists, and umbrella, but her faith
In the civilizing mission of women,
Her backaches and insomnia, her innocent valor;
Another, friend of witch-doctors,
Living on native chop,
Trading tobacco and hooks for fish and fetishes,
Heralded her astonishing arrival
Under shivering stars
By calling, “It’s only me!” A third,
Intent on savage customs, and to demonstrate
That a woman could travel as easily as a man,
Carried a handkerchief damp with wifely tears
And only once permitted a tribal chieftain
To stroke her long, golden hair.
17 Mar: "We Who Weave" by Leconte Dill
We Who Weave
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BY LECONTÉ DILL
On Tyrone Geter’s “The Basket Maker #2”
Weave me closer
to you
with hands dyed indigo
that rake oyster beds
awake
Smell you long
before
I see you
Vanilla sweet
Sweetgrass weaving
wares that keep Yankees coming
on ferries, no bridge
Waters been troubled
Makes you wonder
who put the root on whom first
with doors dyed indigo
Pray the evil spirits away
at the praise house
Make John Hop to stave off John Deere
We migrants
fighting to stay put
Even nomads come home
for a Lowcountry boil
a feast for hungry
prodigal sons
and daughters
with hearts dyed indigo
Dying for you to
weave us closer
16 Mar: Bling Bling Blues by Kevin Young
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=49648
There are two pages. Be sure to click next page for the whole poem.
There are two pages. Be sure to click next page for the whole poem.
15 Mar: "Song of Smoke" by Kevin Young
Song of Smoke
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BY KEVIN YOUNG
To watch you walk
cross the room in your black
corduroys is to see
civilization start—
the wish-
whish-whisk
of your strut is flint
striking rock—the spark
of a length of cord
rubbed till
smoke starts—you stir
me like coal
and for days smoulder.
I am no more
a Boy Scout and, besides,
could never
put you out—you
keep me on
all day like an iron, out
of habit—
you threaten, brick-
house, to burn
all this down. You leave me
only a chimney.