Laynie Brown
 1. I stayed up later than my body
 2. Determined and strange
 3. Am I less cynical unbroken
 4. Unpaid labor frowns
 5. Invisible, redundant with womanhood
 6. So many of my pages part to places I’d rather not say
 7. As I write this curled in sheets on my side
 8. Like a vestigial comma
 9. Knees bent to a V
10. Base of spine, sacred basin
11. In a line from sacrum to skull
12. Am I a less broken division of labor
13. Biology was on my side
14. I married biology and gave birth
15. To write as a mother created matter
16. My children learned to speak, multiplying my efforts
17. A rope was put around my neck but I was not broken
18. My back was vertical
19. I carried only those I chose
 
from the book TRANSLATION OF THE LILIES BACK INTO LISTS / Wave Books
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
I began this book by translating my daily to-do lists into poems.  Every poem is a list poem, titled with the date, which contains, not tasks, but thoughts surrounding daily occupations. The title for the volume is inspired by the poet C.D. Wright and her wonderful title 'Translations of the Gospel Back Into Tongues." The book became elegy, upon the tragic loss of Wright. This book is one in a series of homage texts, written for individual female poets.

Laynie Brown on  "04 . 17 . 16 . 2" 
Color photograph of a peg board hung with multiple similar pens
"Write It Again"

"When something has hooked into my mind or heart, I write it into many drafts. I’d like to write one damn good poem on the subject, then move on. But that’s not how it goes. I wrote more than one hundred poems about my father as he was struggling with Alzheimer’s disease."

via POETS & WRITERS
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Yellow Poetry Daily logo
Poetry Daily Depends on You

Every donation you make helps to bring the best contemporary poetry to readers every morning. If you are able, please consider a contribution today.
Cover of Susan Thenon's book, Ova Completa
What Sparks Poetry:
Silvina López Medin on Susana Thénon's Ova Completa


"This book questions systems of faith and is also, among many other things, something of a search for ways 'to believe'....There must be way out, an exit, Thénon seems to be telling us, and that’s why she keeps asking, questioning, putting one word in front of the other, traversing the void in between, building out of words something that goes beyond words, a space with no hierarchies of language, of register, of form."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2022 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency