United
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
 
When sleepless, it’s helpful to meditate on mottoes of the states.
South Carolina, “While I breathe I hope.”  Perhaps this could be
the new flag on the empty flagpole.
Or “I Direct” from Maine—why?
Because Maine gets the first sunrise?  How bossy, Maine!
Kansas, “To the Stars through Difficulties”--
clackety wagon wheels, long, long land
and the droning press of heat—cool stars, relief.
In Arkansas, “The People Rule”—lucky you.
Idaho, “Let It Be Perpetual”—now this is strange.
Idaho, what is your “it”?
Who chose these lines?
How many contenders?
What would my motto be tonight, in tangled sheets?
Texas—“Friendship”—now boasts the Open Carry law.
Wisconsin, where my mother’s parents are buried,
chose “Forward.”
New Mexico, “It Grows As It Goes”—now this is scary.
Two dangling its. This does not represent that glorious place.
West Virginia, “Mountaineers Are Always Free”—really?
Washington, you’re wise.
What could be better than “By and By”?
Oklahoma must be tired—“Labor Conquers all Things.”
Oklahoma, get together with Nevada, who chose only
“Industry” as motto. I think of Nevada as a playground
or mostly empty. How wrong we are about one another.
For Alaska to pick “North to the Future”
seems odd. Where else are they going?
​
Source: https://poets.org/poem/united?mc_cid=8ce80f8173&mc_eid=7b28ff41f7
Copyright © 2016 by Naomi Shihab Nye. 

A Poem for Pulse
JAMESON FITZPATRICK
 
Last night, I went to a gay bar
with a man I love a little.
After dinner, we had a drink.
We sat in the far-back of the big backyard
and he asked, What will we do when this place closes?
I don't think it's going anywhere any time soon, I said,
though the crowd was slow for a Saturday,
and he said—Yes, but one day. Where will we go?
He walked me the half-block home
and kissed me goodnight on my stoop--
properly: not too quick, close enough
our stomachs pressed together
in a second sort of kiss.
I live next to a bar that's not a gay bar
—we just call those bars, I guess--
and because it is popular
and because I live on a busy street,
there are always people who aren't queer people
on the sidewalk on weekend nights.
Just people, I guess.
They were there last night.
As I kissed this man I was aware of them watching
and of myself wondering whether or not they were just.
But I didn't let myself feel scared, I kissed him
exactly as I wanted to, as I would have without an audience,
because I decided many years ago to refuse this fear--
an act of resistance. I left
the idea of hate out on the stoop and went inside,
to sleep, early and drunk and happy.
While I slept, a man went to a gay club
with two guns and killed forty-nine people.
Today in an interview, his father said he had been disturbed
recently by the sight of two men kissing.
What a strange power to be cursed with:
for the proof of men's desire to move men to violence.
What's a single kiss? I've had kisses
no one has ever known about, so many
kisses without consequence--
but there is a place you can't outrun,
whoever you are.
There will be a time when.
It might be a bullet, suddenly.
The sound of it. Many.
One man, two guns, fifty dead--
Two men kissing. Last night
I can't get away from, imagining it, them,
the people there to dance and laugh and drink,
who didn't believe they'd die, who couldn't have.
How else can you have a good time?
How else can you live?
There must have been two men kissing
for the first time last night, and for the last,
and two women, too, and two people who were neither.
Brown people, which cannot be a coincidence in this country
which is a racist country, which is gun country.
Today I'm thinking of the Bernie Boston photograph
Flower Power, of the Vietnam protestor placing carnations
in the rifles of the National Guard,
and wishing for a gesture as queer and simple.
The protester in the photo was gay, you know,
he went by Hibiscus and died of AIDS,
which I am also thinking about today because
(the government's response to) AIDS was a hate crime.
Now we have a president who names us,
the big and imperfectly lettered us, and here we are
getting kissed on stoops, getting married some of us,
some of us getting killed.
We must love one another whether or not we die.
Love can't block a bullet
but neither can it be shot down,
and love is, for the most part, what makes us--
in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul.
We will be everywhere, always;
there's nowhere else for us, or you, to go.
Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you.
Around any corner, there might be two men. Kissing.
 
 
Source: Jameson Fitzpatrick, "A Poem for Pulse" from Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence.  Copyright © 2017 by Jameson Fitzpatrick.  Found at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147304/a-poem-for-pulse

The House at Long Lake
PHILIP METRES 
 
How a house is a self
     & else, a seeping into
of light deciding the day.
     A house so close

it breathes as the lake
     breathes. How a lake
is a shelf, an eye,
     a species of seeing,

burbling of tongues
     completing the shore.
How a loon is a probing,
     a genus of dreams,

encyclopedia of summer.
     Unsummable house
by the lake, generous hinge
     opening us. I loved,

in folds of sleep, to hear
     the back door’s yawn
& click. You gliding
     down toward shore

​& dawn, beyond all frames,
     reconciling yourself to
bracing Long Lake.
     Into its ever-opening, you--
 
Source: Copyright © 2018 Philip Metres. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Tin House, Summer 2018.

​in lieu of a poem, i'd like to say
DANEZ SMITH                                                  
 
apricots & brown teeth in browner mouths nashing dates & a clementine’s underflesh under yellow nail & dates like auntie heads & the first time someone dried mango there was god & grandma’s Sunday only song & how the plums are better as plums dammit & i was wrong & a June’s worth of moons & the kiss stain of the berries & lord the prunes & the miracle of other people’s lives & none of my business & our hands sticky and a good empty & please please pass the bowl around again & the question of dried or ripe & the sex of grapes & too many dates & us us us us us & varied are the feast but so same the sound of love gorged & the women in the Y hijab a lily in the water & all of us who come from people who signed with x’s & yesterday made delicacy in the wrinkle of the fruit & at the end of my name begins the lot of us
​
Source: Copyright © 2019 by Danez Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 29, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

Summer Haibun
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

To everything, there is a season of parrots. Instead of feathers, we searched the sky for meteors on our last night.  Salamanders use the stars to find their way home. Who knew they could see that far, fix the tiny beads of their eyes on distant arrangements of lights so as to return to wet and wild nests? Our heads tilt up and up and we are careful to never look at each other. You were born on a day of peaches splitting from so much rain and the slick smell of fresh tar and asphalt pushed over a cracked parking lot. You were strong enough—even as a baby—to clutch a fistful of thistle and the sun himself was proud to light up your teeth when they first swelled and pushed up from your gums. And this is how I will always remember you when we are covered up again: by the pale mica flecks on your shoulders. Some thrown there from your own smile. Some from my own teeth. There are not enough jam jars to can this summer sky at night. I want to spread those little meteors on a hunk of still-warm bread this winter. Any trace left on the knife will make a kitchen sink like that evening air
​
the cool night before
star showers: so sticky so
warm so full of light
 
Source: Copyright © 2017 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 7, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.

Dear Death 
KATHLEEN MCGOOKEY
 
can't you see we're busy riding bikes in the sun? Later we'll cut out
paper hearts and sprinkle them with glitter. I have had enough of
you. I'd rather learn facts about penguins: what they eat, how much
they weigh, how they stay warm in the Antarctic. Some are called
Emperor. Some, Rockhopper. First-graders with gap-toothed smiles
hold out the class guinea pig for me to pet. Let's pretend you forget
all about us.
 
Source: Originally published in Heart in a Jar, Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2017

Voice Clear As
KEMI ALABI                                                            
 
When my mom discovers heaven’s just a noise festival

the godchoir of all her loves breathing
unsnagged by asthma or Newport-dragged lung

the true song life makes untethered from a body
tugged at last from the men who hold its reins

will she blame her pastors (like I did)
for Sunday portraits of pooled white gold?

Will she miss the wooden flute of her body
mourn the days corner-propped, cloaked in dust

too pious to disturb a room’s skin cells
and stray hair with her sound

snapped awake at the nightmare of a slip fringe
the private note sung aloud?

Or, unburdened by hell

​will she exhale
and hear the bells?
 
Source: poets.org.  Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 16, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Courtyard
DARIEN HSU GEE
 
Her new family has her dowry—her chickens have become his chickens. Clipped wings fly the short distance to nowhere. Her future husband has returned to the village. His parents had sent a message to the university: Come home quickly. There is an emergency. It took several days to make the journey and he arrived weary, expecting an ailing father. Instead, a wedding ceremony with him as the man of honor, and her, sitting on the bed, dressed and waiting, vision obscured. She tries to imagine what he looks like. When he lifts the heavy red veil from her face, she sees kind eyes. She lies with him that night, spreads her legs and consecrates the marital bed. The next morning, she is alone. Her new husband has returned to school in Shanghai, a city she has only heard of. Her husband is an educated man, she cannot read or write. He is Jīdūjiào—a Christian. No one in the village understands this, not even his own parents. She tends the graves of his ancestors, looks after his mother and father as if they were her own. Nine months later, a girl is born, company for a short time—the baby dies an infant. Still he does not return. All that remains is a handful of chickens, the rest slaughtered for her wedding banquet.

Source: Poetry Daily .  Originally published in Other Small Histories, Poetry Society of America.  Copyright © 2020 by Darien Hsu Gee.

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further PossibilitiesCHEN CHEN
 
To be a good
ex/current friend for R. To be one last

inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship
advice for L. To be advice

for my mother. To be a more comfortable
hospital bed for my mother. To be

no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time,
America for my uncle, who wants to be China

for me. To be a country of trafficless roads
& a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go

fast. To be a cyclone
of laughter when my parents say

their new coworker is like that, they can tell
because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t,

can’t be one of them. To be the one
my parents raised me to be--

a season from the planet
of planet-sized storms.

​To be a backpack of PB&J & every
thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming

their own storms. To be, for me, nobody,
homebody, body in bed watching TV. To go 2D

& be a painting, an amateur’s hilltop & stars,
simple decoration for the new apartment

with you. To be close, J.,
to everything that is close to you--

blue blanket, red cup, green shoes
with pink laces.

To be the blue & the red.
The green, the hot pink.

Source:  Originally published in When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org, 2017). Found at poetryfoundation.org

​Ways to Disappear
CAMILLE RANKINE                                       

In the dark
Down a stairwell
Through the doorway
Gone west
With a new wish
In daylight
Down the sidewalk
In a wool coat
In a white dress
Without a name
Without asking
On your knees
On your stomach
Gone silent
In the backseat
In the courtroom
In a cage
In the desert
In the park
Gone swimming
On the shortest night
At the bottom of the lake
In pieces
In pictures
Without meaning
Without a face
Seeking refuge
In a new land
Gone still
In the heart
With your head bowed
In deference
In sickness
In surrender 
With your hands up
On the sidewalk
In the daylight
In the dark

Sadness Isn’t The Only Muse
DERRICK AUSTIN
 
I can’t imagine myself reading bedtime stories
to a toddler, and I’m older than my father was
when he read those brightly colored books to me.
His voice is deeper than mine will ever be
but just as sweet. I always picked Freight Train.
I loved the black caboose. A train runs across this track…
through tunnels and cities, darkness and light, forever.
I still love books where nothing happens,
good or bad. The page is one landscape I move through.
 
Source: Poetry Daily

Imagine Weather Indoors. Perhaps a thunderstorm in the attic? A tornado in the kitchen.   I love the magical realism in this prompt, and  wish I could remember where I saw this because I'd like to give proper credit.  It's been so long ago.  So.  Here we are . . . time to write!