With his hopscotch grid for a wrist
see my blue boy

with a smile like a one-string guitar,
relative to nobody,

dropping out of school,
out of line, saying

I love you more than life itself
in a first Valentine's card

during the term
in which we turn fifteen.

In the attic of an old phone, now,
here he is again

in the drawer I was emptying
during a hymn I was singing

before I met him
& here he is, my blue boy—

now watch this older girl stop
& throw her day out with the dust

& turn blue, too.

This whole impermanence thing is deceptive.
Looks lifelong, actually, to me

still stuck here moulding Mason jars
of words to preserve him with,

wondering if a poem ten years on
is still a pining, asking

how many more I'll make
having learned, at last,

how little of us keeps.
from the book QUIET: POEMS / Alfred A. Knopf
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I’m moved by the ways that we can look back our pasts, perhaps via a photograph or a journal entry, and see both how much of ourselves we recognise and somehow, simultaneously, how much we’ve transformed. This is a poem that mourns how any given time in life can be impossible to preserve, no matter how significant it might once have been.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley on "Fifteen"
Black-and-white headshot of a seated Gertrude Stein
"The Significance of Gertrude Stein’s Subversive Poems"

"For Stein, poetry’s proper subject would be poetry itself. Far from being an allegorizing occultist, the mission of Stein’s work was to distill language to its most basic elements whereby there is a redemption of abstraction only after descending through the most abject concreteness. What are a snowy wood, a red wheelbarrow, or a rose, but words, words, words."

viaLITHUB
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Cover image of Evie Shockley's book, Suddenly We
What Sparks Poetry:
Evie Shockley on Language as Form


"I found this truism (which seems to readily reproduce itself: 'one sin begets another,' 'one tragedy begets another,' 'one wedding begets another') bubbling up in my brain. If only one vote begat another in that inevitable way, I sighed, thinking of how hard it was to get women’s right to vote established as the law of the land—and of how long it was after that before Black women were able to exercise their 'women’s rights.'"
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