a note on the body
Danez Smith
 
your body still your body
your arms still wing
your mouth still a gun
 
          you tragic, misfiring bird
 
you have all you need to be a hero
don’t save the world, save yourself
 
you worship too much & you worship too much
 
when prayer doesn’t work:      dance, fly, fire
 
this is your hardest scene
when you think the whole sad thing might end
 
but you live      oh, you live
 
everyday you wake you raise the dead
 
          everything you do is a miracle

From Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) Copyright © 2017 by Danez Smith. Source: Academy of American Poets here
​

Writing Prompts: 

• Write a poem that "raises the dead," that cheers on survival, that resounds about the arms that can still "wing."
• Write a poem about how "everything you do is a miracle."
• Write a poem that defies whatever happened to your character in your writing from the first prompt.
• Write a poem that defies any wrong doing that has happened to you. Reclaim your body, your heart, your spirit.
• Watch "Today" and write about that.

"Let my body be a godless church holy for no reason beyond itself"
"Let the curse of my blood be the old testament and each day I am still alive be the new"
"My name still my name and it is a good name
and I am still here . . . despite"

In this six-minute listen, hear Danez Smith and NPR host Michel Martin talk #NPRPoetry Month.  I'm featuring this discussion because it sets us up for our February writing challenges, which is to explore form/structure and word play in writing poetry.  Consider Smith's points about use of space and line breaks and the visual aspect of how a poem operates on the page.  

Still I Rise
Maya Angelou
​You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

​Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
From And Still I Rise by Maya Angelou. Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou.
Source: poets.org/poem/still-i-rise

Purple as tulips in May, mauve
into lush velvet, purple
as the stain blackberries leave
on the lips, on the hands,
the purple of ripe grapes
sunlit and warm as flesh.
 
Every day I will give you a color,
like a new flower in a bud vase
on your desk. Every day
I will paint you, as women
color each other with henna
on hands and on feet.
 
Red as henna, as cinnamon,
as coals after the fire is banked,
the cardinal in the feeder,
the roses tumbling on the arbor
their weight bending the wood
the red of the syrup I make from petals.
 
Orange as the perfumed fruit
hanging their globes on the glossy tree,
orange as pumpkins in the field,
orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs
who come to eat it, orange as my
cat running lithe through the high grass.
 
Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,
yellow as a hill of daffodils,
yellow as dandelions by the highway,
yellow as butter and egg yolks,
yellow as a school bus stopping you,
yellow as a slicker in a downpour.

Here is my bouquet, here is a sing
song of all the things you make
me think of, here is oblique
praise for the height and depth
of you and the width too.
Here is my box of new crayons at your feet.
 
Green as mint jelly, green
as a frog on a lily pad twanging,
the green of cos lettuce upright
about to bolt into opulent towers,
green as Grand Chartreuse in a clear
glass, green as wine bottles.
 
Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums,
bachelors’ buttons. Blue as Roquefort,
blue as Saga. Blue as still water.
Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat.
Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring
azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop.
 
Cobalt as the midnight sky
when day has gone without a trace
and we lie in each other’s arms
eyes shut and fingers open
and all the colors of the world
pass through our bodies like strings of fire.
 
Marge Piercy, “Colors passing through us” from Colors Passing Through Us (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). ​

Green Means Literally a Thousand Things or More
Matt Donovan
​
So concludes an essay on “Fern Hill,” in which the student seems
somewhere between jazzed up & pissed off that green might mean
so many things from one stanza to the next: here, a blooming

Eden proxy; here, rot made by the grip of time. For starters. Or
that sun-slaked field, not far from our classroom, as lush-green
as any Welsh farmyard, greyed overnight with frost. Emerald

beer bottle hurled from a car. The slack-jawed lime-green
goblin face spanning a front porch post-Halloween
for so many weeks it looks like it’s here to stay. The long-ago

brown-green of Cleveland, where it rained always & without pity
upon a past I crave despite myself & our team lost always 14—2.
Every time we waited in the bleachers for the game to resume,

my father would look down upon the outfield’s diagonal lines
& proclaim Still a lot of green out there, meaning anything
can happen & will. Have you ever heard in a crowd the saddest part

of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” where everyone lies & pretends
we don’t care if we ever get back & makes the last word echo
twice more? We always want to get back, whether or not

we’re hailing childhood green. Like the student in her essay,
I too could keep rattling off images of spring & decay—June
sunset horizon flash, summer hair stained olive from churning

over-chlorinated pools, green shadow of a hand somewhere
that makes it feel as if owls were bearing everything away--
instead of looking again at the image online I glimpsed before

returning to the still-ungraded hay-high stack of student work. 
Maybe you saw it too? Maybe you also had the spellbound luck
of wandering to other tasks instead of asking what it means to know

anything can happen in a wholly different way, instead of looking 
once more at the slash of police tape that is the only horizon
that matters just now for the two men in the photograph who sit

together on the curb, faces glowing blue-red in the lights, both of them
bleary-eyed but alive, swaddled in aftermath & a blanket that is green,
a detail that couldn’t matter less, given how the numbers of the dead

still rise. Here we are again, as inevitable as the clock’s tick, looking in
at a place that now will never be young. Is there a way to say it--
There’s been a shooting—that will allow it to be heard, remembered

& heard without the easy glide of our past tense? That will stop us
from wanting to turn to anything under the wide starry sky that is not
the green fire burning in the minds of those men or the green

of a blanket America provides & provides without change? 

Copyright © 2019 by Matt Donovan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 19, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

POEM PROMPT: Write your own “Things I Learned Last Week" poem. Consider using what you tried, what you wrote, what you said, what you texted, people you thought about, last words to expand the poem.

POEM PROMPT: Write your own“What I Learned from _____.” Fill in the blank with a retro superhero/ine, an illness, a windfall, talking less listening more. 

​Hear Aimee Nezhukumatathil read her poem at poetryfoundation.org

• Write a poem about a TV show that reflects your life, where “those characters were me."  Or free write about a TV show that informed your life in some way.
• Write a poem where you ask questions of the characters in a TV show.  What do you want to know?

 

Scary Movies
by Kim Addonizio

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,   
and I keep expecting some enormous   
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops   
to appear at the edge of the horizon,

to come striding over the ocean   
and drag me from my kitchen   
to the deep cave that flickered   
into my young brain one Saturday

at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless   
between my older brothers, pumped up   
on candy and horror—that cave,
the litter of human bones

gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,   
I can smell their stench as clearly
as the bacon fat from breakfast. This   
is how it feels to lose it--

not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is   
that helps you get up in the morning
and actually leave the house
on those days when it seems like death

in his brown uniform
is cruising his panel truck
of packages through your neighborhood.   
I think of a friend’s voice

on her answering machine--
Hi, I’m not here--
the morning of her funeral,   
the calls filling up the tape

and the mail still arriving,
and I feel as afraid as I was
after all those vampire movies   
when I’d come home and lie awake

all night, rigid in my bed,
unable to get up
even to pee because the undead   
were waiting underneath it;

if I so much as stuck a bare
foot out there in the unprotected air   
they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me   
under. And my parents said there was

nothing there, when I was older   
I would know better, and now   
they’re dead, and I’m older,   
and I know better.

Kim Addonizio, “Scary Movies” from What Is This Thing Called Love. Copyright © 2004 by Kim Addonizio. 

On the occasion of receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, Patrick Phillips talks about his children's writing, why he doesn't call himself  a poet,  and he then reads the poem "Matinee."

 

1. Write a poem about metamorphosis and/or about “shapeshifting.”
2. Write a poem about being born.
3. Hone in on a specific phrase, and write a poem in response to it.

BECOMING BIRD
By Bob Hicok

It began with a tattoo gun to his back.
Face down, he sniffed the skin of dead men
on an execution table the artist bought
from a guard who pinched it from the trash

at Jacksons' Prison. It was to be one feather
outside each scapula, an idea
that arrived while he flipped Art
Through the Ages past the slide view

of Kristos Boy, who without arms and confined
to the appetite of marble, still seemed
poised for air, to lift through the roof
of the Acropolis Museum into the polluted sky

of Athens, bound for translucence. But healed,
turning left, right in a sandwich of mirrors,
​the lonely feathers asked to be plucked,
the black ink grew from the root of dusk

to charcoal tip, they'd have fluttered
if wind arrived, reflex to join the rush,
but alone seemed less symbolic than forgotten.
So he returned to the Cunning Needle,

to Martha of pierced tongue and navel, said
wings and she slapped the table, added
coverts and scapulars, secondaries
and tertials, for a year needles chewed

his skin closer to hawk, to dove, injected
acrylic through tiny pearls of blood.
Then with a back that belonged to the sky
he couldn't stop, sprouted feathers

to collarline, down thighs, past knees
and his feet became scaled, claws gripped
the tops of his toes, she turned him over
for the fine work of down, he laid arms

on the syringe–wings of the table,
a model of crucifixion dreaming flight
through the pricks. So now, by day's end
he can barely hold back the confidence

of his wings. At home, naked with eyes
closed, he feels wind as music
and dreams his body toward a mouse
skimming the woven grass, not considering

but inhabiting the attack, falling hard
as hunger teasing the reach of land,
while from the ink of the first tattoo
a real feather grows, useless but patient.

"Becoming Bird" copyright ©2000 by Bob Hicok. The poem first appeared in Quarterly West #51, 2000