10 poems // March 10

you always are the poem i am trying to write

1 //

I Asked God for the Moon // by Natasha Oladokun

I think it would probably kill God to give a direct answer to anything.
And it would probably kill me to hear the direct answer.
In this way God and I spare each other
the awkward conversation, with both our arms shaking
under this ashy rock that won’t fit through my door—
this thing he brought me because, drunk, I asked him to.

2 //

from And Then the Weather Arrives // by Eileen Myles

I don’t know no one
anymore who’s
up all night.
Wouldn’t it be fun
to hear someone
really tired come
walking
up your stairs
and knock on your door.
Come here
and share the rain
with me. You.
Isn’t it wonderful to hear
the universe
shudder. How old it all,
everything,
must be.

3 //

World’s End // by Victoria Chang

Will earth stop spinning?
Will there only be hair left?
We are made of war—
it stays in the air, mixed with oxygen, we breathe
it in and deploy it out.
Our birth is easy on us
but hard on everything else.

4 //

Short Poem of Gratitude For the Anomaly Intersections Around NYC Whose Often Overlooked Crosswalk Signs Are Permanently Fixed on the Walk Icon and Never Ever Show the Don’t Walk Icon // by Basie Allen

You always are
The poem I am trying to write

Your encouragement
Goes a long way

Thank you

5 //

Only as the Day Is Long // by Dorianne Laux

Soon she will be no more than a passing thought,
a pang, a timpani of wind in the chimes, bent spoons
hung from the eaves on a first night in a new house
on a street where no dog sings, no cat visits
a neighbor cat in the middle of the street, winding
and rubbing fur against fur, throwing sparks.

Her atoms are out there, circling the earth, minus
her happiness, minus her grief, only her body’s
water atoms, her hair and bone and teeth atoms,
her fleshy atoms, her boozy atoms, her saltines
and cheese and tea, but not her piano concerto
atoms, her atoms of laughter and cruelty, her atoms
of lies and lilies along the driveway and her slippers,
Lord her slippers, where are they now?

6 //

from First // by Carrie Fountain

My heart is so giant this evening,
like one of those moons so full
and beautiful and terrifying
if you see it when you’re getting out
of the car you have to go inside the house
and make someone else come out
and see it for themselves. I want every-
thing, I admit. I want yes of course
and I want it all the time.

7 //

from NDN Homopoetics // by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Boy becomes a 3-D printing of a man. It brings me comfort to think of my gender as a farmer’s field already rototilled, already cleaned up. I become less of who I am by the second. Look at the branches growing from my teeth! Then there’s the mare, tipsy on me, grazing to no end. If I were to speak, I’d sound like a cracked windshield, typo-ridden. These 206 lonely bones have each gained a type of consciousness; they pretend not to harbor hard feelings about me, my ungodly molecularity. What can I say about my shadow? It loves the unlit street more than it does me. Sometimes a body is that which happens to you. Everyday, dime-sized holes proliferate on my flesh, as if I were trying to free myself from myself. I will go on like this forever: with the earth ringing in my chest.

8 //

from [Sometimes I don’t know if I’m having a feeling] // by Matthew Siegel

You have seen me like this before, such a strange
version of the person you thought you knew.
Guess what, I’m strange to us both. It’s like
I’m not even me sometimes. Who am I? A question
for the Lord only to decide as She looks over
my résumé. Everything is different sometimes.
Sometimes there is no hand on my shoulder
but my room, my apartment, my body are containers
and I am thusly contained. How easy to forget
the obvious. The walls, blankets, sunlight, your love.

9//

from Like Three Fair Branches from One Root Deriv’d // by Robert Hass

Meanwhile
we are passing through the gate
with everything we love. We go
as fire, as flesh, as marble.
Sometimes it is good and sometimes
it is dangerous like the ignorance
of particulars, but our words are clear
and our movements give off light.

10 //

XXIX. // by Anne Carson

I grin.
I eat.

Thousand of cuts morning and night,

practising fierce techniques of horrible war! useless.
Dread masters me.
I do not master dread.