Because I am their daughter my body is not mine.
I was raised like fruit, unpeeled & then peeled. Raised
to bleed in some man’s bed. I was given my name
& with it my instructions. Pure. Pure.

& is it wasted on me? Every moment I do not touch
myself, every moment I leave my body on its back
to be a wife while I go somewhere above the room.

I return to the soil & search. I know it’s there. Buried
shallow, wrapped in rags dark with old & forgotten rust,
their discarded part.
Buried without ceremony,
buried like fallen seeds.

I wonder about the trees: Date palms veined
through the fruit with the copper taste of cutting.
Guavas that, when slit, purple dark as raw meat.

I have to wonder, of course, about the blood orange, about the pomegranate, splayed open, like something that once was alive & remains.

Safia Elhillo

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.

Langston Hughes

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor —
not like food, sweet or sharp.
More like a fine powder, like dust.
And I wasn’t elated or frightened,
but simply rapt, aware.
That’s how it is sometimes —
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.

Dorianne Laux

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower
and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,
enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy
and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis
of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,
the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost
letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and
the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough
of the mother and the child and the father and the child
and enough of the pointing to the world, weary
and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.

Ada Limón

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:

I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island
And its sands are fair:

Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.

Langston Hughes

How lucky we are
That you can’t sell
A poem, that it has
No value. Might
As well
Give it away.

That poem you love,
That saved your life,
Wasn’t it given to you?

Gregory Orr

Her eyes are narrow, her hips jut out:
a replica of every girl we’ve ever known.
He kisses her mouth hard with tongue & spit.
I hated the way she bossed me, the way
she was a woman & i was still a girl.
Raw tobacco swayed in the barn.
You just a baby, she tells me
her voice sounding like pity
her hand flapping in the wind like her mother’s.

Crystal Wilkinson

What’s hard is deciding what we need to spell out,
and what would trip you up, where can’t you cope.
There is a kind of urban legend, or myth,

that we never say what we mean, or even try,
but those are fighting words. Besides the hype
it’s mostly dishonesty we can’t stand;

that, and people who have so much self-doubt
that they never say what they want.
Most of us are older than you think.

We definitely do not all have the same type.
Each of us fears isolation, but cherishes solitude,
along with our ability to count,

divide, and let our complex math include
all relevant variables: the x, the y,
and anything else that matters to all of us, with
the important exception of the kitchen
table, or else the kitchen sink.

Stephanie Burt

Binary thinking leaves out so much. For example,
Reading only left to right, or up and down,

Ignores all our wishes for comfort, for circular motion,
All the ways that the happier letterforms seek the option

Not to stand alone. Their living space is ample,
Hot in June, cold in March, with pencil lines of frost

Along the stems and twigs in all their dewy, new-built
Nests. Some warblers build more than one.

Each feels tiny compared to thunderstorms, construction
Cranes, plate tectonics and how the past

Harms the present with its slush-avalanches of guilt,
And yet it made us—us. How little we know. How much

Knowing isn’t the point. We love how the letters can touch.

Stephanie Burt

All things must come
to an end, but I never
want them to end: I would rather keep on
an open book, continue whatever
gets me excited, replay
a lightning strike, or cast
a plumb line that may never touch
the bottom, crash
through every stubborn wall. It’s
true that I come to a point. I divide
each present from every past. But I also exist
to celebrate what’s next; I support
purposiveness, enterprise, and the intrepid spirit
of getting things done. That’s why I feel deeply akin
to vacuum cleaners, to the letter T,
to batteries, and to the short
and long versions of any handmade stroke
that could be the numeral 1, or an 1, or an I.
I am, also, an inkblot, a sudden stain
emerging below a quill pen, a sign
of danger, and a way to be overjoyed,
an antiquated firearm along
with smoke from its retort.
And I have been able to see
myself as a telescope;
a way to print
the otherwise
unprintable; a tail
for flight, or for seaside escape,
and even the kind
of anchor that stands for hope.
I am the lever big enough
to move the world, the world you move,
actions and actors,
the proof and the claim you prove,
the product of all mathematical factors.
You cannot use me
as a taxi, or for a quick lift, or just to get
yourself from one place to another; I mean to stay.
I can announce
the end of everything,
the feeling of dangling, of having
the world on a string,
or else a new day.

Stephanie Burt