July 28

Akwaeke Emezi

will i remember moments like this, standing on grass, the sky yawning over me

swahili beating out of speakers, dancing with a crowd of strangers

wondering how love has done nothing more to my body other than deform

the left side of my chest

will i remember brooklyn, the shocking beauty of a lighted train

running above ground and against the sky, before night wraps around fulton

an old woman kissing the bus driver’s cheek

green tennis balls poured over the courts on malcolm x

a little Black girl i do not know shouting adios amigo as she crosses the street

the smell of a roti shop, silk sliding on my arms

yellow kitchens, guavas and parathas

a white box fan whirring in our last summer

Answer July

Emily Dickinson

1830 –1886

Answer July—

Where is the Bee—

Where is the Blush—

Where is the Hay?

Ah, said July—

Where is the Seed—

Where is the Bud—

Where is the May—

Answer Thee—Me—

Nay—said the May—

Show me the Snow—

Show me the Bells—

Show me the Jay!

Quibbled the Jay—

Where be the Maize—

Where be the Haze—

Where be the Bur?

Here—said the Year—

A Boat, Beneath a Sunny Sky

Lewis Carroll

1832 –1898

A boat, beneath a sunny sky

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky:

Echoes fade and memories die:

Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,

Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—

Lingering in the golden gleam—

Life, what is it but a dream?

Poem in July

Samuel Amadon

I felt perfected along the rectangle 

By its ragged side

Fences trees and mist dropping

Some space for the flowers

I set an image in my head where

Bushes in their out of focus

Made a green dearth about the door

I wanted to do a book on

Pages left in the heat or rain

But my desire seemingly disappeared

Picked up by a car in the middle of

A pack of cigarettes

This trip into the forest

The trees trading with memory to

Frame the various breaks

The pleasures of small laws cut

Behind the mower with my eyes

Running the grass blades

We don’t really get any older

I can see what that means

To Don Quixote

H. J. Massingham

You saw the world a golden age,

     A country wench a Queen,

What is dull, wonted, formal, stale

     Magnificent Has Been;

Against you, zany of world’s stage,

     The man of safety wins;

But heaven shall be your own tilt-yard,

     Its palaces your inns.

LETTER VII: Remember to Breathe

Margaret Rhee

To hear poetry and to read poetry are different acts.

Reading poetry makes me feel calm.

And you, dear reader, I wonder if

you also feel this way.

Consider this articulation.

Reading poetry: You must gaze upon, pay attention to words, and

consider pacing,

an attentiveness not usually asked

in our contemporary world.

I gaze into your eyes, we remember to breathe.

Turn the page.

Reading poetry is the opposite of eating with

your phone

Without thought to the

opening and closing of one’s mouth

The taste and texture of the food on the edges and tips of

one’s tongue

Warmth of the food, and how it envelops you.

A different kind of information than the Scroll.

Luddites

Lord George Gordon Byron

1.

As the Liberty lads o’er the sea

Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,

          So we, boys, we

     Will die fighting, or live free,

And down with all kings but King Ludd!

2.

When the web that we weave is complete,

And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,

         We will fling the winding sheet

    O’er the despot at our feet,

And dye it deep in the gore he has poured.

3.

Though black as his heart its hue,

Since his veins are corrupted to mud,

         Yet this is the dew

     Which the tree shall renew

Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!

Lake Michigan II

S. Brook Corfman

For ten days I slept only four or six hours, subject
              to a small blonde bulldog. But deeply, her
a burr to me. I’d never had a pet; I did not expect
              to let her into the bed. But I soften and warm.
Like my old love I loved her despite, which made it
              no less true. It seemed the lake was leaving me
the longer I strayed east. My choice was not choice but a wish,
              only mine, the way his naps in late afternoon were his.
When we watched the flat world we weren’t
              flat anymore, especially me, my small breasts, but we couldn’t
parse it. The night is still there behind the day.
              A new feeling told me how beautiful I was
and how silly was it that I agreed. This was a true account
of how it will have happened, and then it was simply true.

How To Take a Life

Janel Pineda

Keep a son from his mother until her last breath.

         When she goes, all she’ll know of him is desert

heat, folded letters, a phantom of his sixteen-year-old self outside

         her nursing home window, unable to come inside. Venite,

Chepito, venite. If he could, he’d leave the gang, leave the gun,

         come home. Venite. If he could, he’d disappear the war,

his father’s strike, his father’s stroke. If he could, he’d

         pick a different place, a different time, free his hands

of any crime, of any charge. When he goes, all he’ll know

         of her is the faint fatigue of her voice, her full name tattooed

beneath his throat. When he goes, all he’ll know of life is

         every inch of a cell, the way the decades flew by, and how he was made

to rot, alone.

The Abduction

Stanley Kunitz

1905 –2006

Some things I do not profess 

to understand, perhaps

not wanting to, including

whatever it was they did

with you or you with them

that timeless summer day

when you stumbled out of the wood,

distracted, with your white blouse torn

and a bloodstain on your skirt.

"Do you believe?" you asked.

Between us, through the years,

we pieced enough together

to make the story real:

how you encountered on the path

a pack of sleek, grey hounds,

trailed by a dumbshow retinue

in leather shrouds; and how

you were led, through leafy ways,

into the presence of a royal stag,

flaming in his chestnut coat,

who kneeled on a swale of moss

before you; and how you were borne

aloft in triumph through the green,

stretched on his rack of budding horn,

till suddenly you found yourself alone

in a trampled clearing.

That was a long time ago,

almost another age, but even now, 

when I hold you in my arms, 

I wonder where you are.

Sometimes I wake to hear

the engines of the night thrumming

outside the east bay window

on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.

You lie beside me in elegant repose,

a hint of transport hovering on your lips,

indifferent to the harsh green flares

that swivel through the room,

searchlights controlled by unseen hands.

Out there is a childhood country,

bleached faces peering in

with coals for eyes.

Our lives are spinning out

from world to world;

the shapes of things

are shifting in the wind.

What do we know

beyond the rapture and the dread?

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

1935 –2019

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Honestly

John Ashbery

1927 –2017

we could send you out there

to join the cackle squad,

but hey, that highly accomplished,

thinly regarded equestrian—well there was no way

he was going to join the others’ field trip.

Wouldn’t put his head on the table.

But here’s the thing:

They had owned great dread,

knew of a way to get away from here

through ice and smoke

always clutching her fingers, like it says

to do.

Once we were passionate about the police,

yawned in the teeth of pixels,

but a far rumor blanked us out.

We bathed in moonshine.

Now, experts disagree.

Were we unhappy or sublime?

We’ll have to wait until the next time

an angel comes rapping at the door

to rejoice docently.

(I know there’s a way to do this.)

The Dance of the Lambs and the Birds

Ameen AnimashaunGreen, 

and green, and suddenly            a light trapped in a soft shell.                        Above the city of Jericho, the chickens are coming home             to roost. I rewrite history                         and keep the apple where no handcan reach it. Sinai because             your breath is fear. Pisgah                         because your touch is hurt.I am scared of all that I am              capable of. To break a body                         is to know it  for what it truly is. You say this              is love, so I surrender my wants                         at your feet. To know a body is to break it wide open, and I have grown              to love everything about nothing.                         Out in the wilderness, the guard dog is eating a thunderstorm              and the night’s skin is an eye                         sore. Damn the consequences. I trace the lone graph of my body              and study its careful intricacies. Then,                         like you, I lift the nothingness of me above my head and tip it over              the blade of rocks. I do not want to bury anything                        I do not want to bury. Copyright © 2025 by Ameen Animashaun

From “traslaciones” [to sell the wasteland teeming with ghosts]

Wingston González

translated from the Spanish by Urayoán Noel to sell the wasteland teeming with ghosts the cavernous tongues hanging in the sun the flanks skyfacing the braids they sold the countryside naked and frozen the red roof of the tabernacle the flag and an immense tv glued to my history still early a funeral on the cartoon network : in whose full darkness i am subjected linguistic philosophical variant of the little bones of angela yvonne davis dislocation of the mississippi body i be of a stairway on the trembling coast down south they found the dead bodies of the divers that we sent to look for my skeleton we are at best the treasures that sank with the disheveled ships of civilization

Garden Abstract

Hart Crane

1899 –1932

The apple on its bough is her desire,—Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.

The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,

Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise

Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.

She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree,

The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,

Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,

Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.

She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope

Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.

LOW FLYING PLANES [From metal and yellow underneath the tire]

Hajjar Baban

From metal and yellow underneath the tire flattening I couldn’t decipher the bird or the material which my mother would leave me through, in. I, missing everything, had to turn, believe in reason. Because my mother decided to name me after flight I abandoned rocks I left countries. Emerald that could never be blue and lavender rose. I’ve forgiven every danger just to sleep with no stone in my mind. I kept thinking of my father when his mother passed. When my brother made someone die. So I could tear, beyond imagining what above would fly.

You! Inez!

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

1875 –1935

Orange gleams athwart a crimson soulLambent flames; purple passion lurksIn your dusk eyes.

Red mouth; flower soft,

Your soul leaps up—and flashesStar-like, white, flame-hot.

Curving arms, encircling a world of love,You! Stirring the depths of passionate desire!

Unity

Pablo Neruda

1904 –1973

There is something dense, united, settled in the depths,

repeating its number, its identical sign.

How it is noted that stones have touched time,

in their refined matter there is an odor of age,

of water brought by the sea, from salt and sleep.

 

I’m encircled by a single thing, a single movement: 

a mineral weight, a honeyed light

cling to the sound of the word “noche”:

the tint of wheat, of ivory, of tears,

things of leather, of wood, of wool,

archaic, faded, uniform,

collect around me like walls.

I work quietly, wheeling over myself,

a crow over death, a crow in mourning.

I mediate, isolated in the spread of seasons,

centric, encircled by a silent geometry:

a partial temperature drifts down from the sky,

a distant empire of confused unities

reunites encircling me.

For My People

Margaret Walker

1915 –1998

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs     repeatedly: 

their dirges and their ditties and their blues      and jubilees, 

praying their prayers nightly to an     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an     unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years,

 to the     gone years and the now years and the maybe years,    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching    dragging along never gaining never reaping never    knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama    backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor    and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking    and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss    Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn     to know the reasons why and the answers to and the    people who and the places where and the days when, in    memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we    were black and poor and small and different and nobody    cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to    be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and    play and drink their wine and religion and success, to    marry their playmates and bear children and then die    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox    Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New    Orleans,

lost disinherited dispossessed and happy    people filling the cabarets and taverns and other    people’s pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and    land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time     being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when     burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled     and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures     who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in     the dark of churches and schools and clubs and     societies, associations and councils and committees and      conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and     devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,     

preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by     false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,    

trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,    

all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless    

generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. 

Let a    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now     rise and take control.

Nothing Twice

Wisława Szymborska

1923 –2012

Nothing can ever happen twice.

In consequence, the sorry fact is

that we arrive here improvised

and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,

if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,

you can’t repeat the class in summer:

this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,no two nights will teach what bliss is

in precisely the same way,

with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tonguementions your name by accident:

I feel as if a rose were flunginto the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you’re here with me,I can’t help looking at the clock:

A rose? A rose? 

What could that be?

Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day

with so much needless fear and sorrow?

It’s in its nature not to stay:

Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer

to seek accord beneath our star,

although we’re different (we concur)just as two drops of water are.

America

Walt Whitman

1819 –1892

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair'd in the adamant of Time.