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Michael Wasson
I begin the day like any other
day: a decade staring back

in the rearview mirror
of the wrecked pickup truck: you

standing so tall you're already
headless: until I turn around

the cornfield blurs into the torn
edges of an atlas: pull your hands

out from under me to anoint
this god-gifted country of yours:

mottled bones singing
the anthem of a star-

spangled nation:
this land granted enough

time to list its own
possibilities: atrocities

a blade of dusk resting
on my throat, I bruise: by standing

I practice the sacred: & kneel
how the body was built

toward the bottomless insides
of ghosts: the small of my back

the sacrum: they say, the five
disciples with pocked faces,

not your self-inflicted gunshot
but a single entryway: an emptiness

full of faith: rise to me as only you
would after god has left

you with these entrance wounds
& no way out: the purpling field

that goes on & on: recognizable
as a heartbeat: a century-

long orbit around a cage
of stained glass: broken, you

gather me in your image
of failed flesh: piecing mirror

after mirror back together through
the night until no one forgets: one

hundred years of this landscape
behind & before us

continues to stir—even if
the earth under our knees,

under every American sky,
had been turning west-

ward for centuries.
from the book SWALLOWED LIGHT/ Copper Canyon Press
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Informal photograph of avery r. young in front of well-filled book shelves
"avery r. young Named Chicago's First Poet Laureate"

“avery r. young has been named Chicago's first ever Poet Laureate....young is a performer and teacher. The city said he's mentored a generation of young artists. His first official appearance will be this weekend at the Harold Washington Library to celebrate National Poetry Month.”

via CBS NEWS
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Cover image of "Poetics for the More-Than-Human World," in which Lesley Battler's poem, "redundant," appears
What Sparks Poetry:
Lesley Battler on "redundant"


"I chose to feature 'redundant' as this is one of my first poems written as the pandemic started to unfold. It marks a shift in my work, from a focus on resource industry capitalism to a more interior world, mapping the psychological dissonance caused by the virus along with the greater issue of climate change. In this poem, and in all my post-COVID writing, I have continued working with found texts and I think this poem’s language and boxed-in structure reflect a sense of diminishment and claustrophobia."
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Write with Poetry Daily
 
This April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, we'll share popular writing prompts from our "What Sparks Poetry" essay series each morning. Write along with us!

In Yi Lei's poem, "Black Hair," the speaker contemplates feminine power, beauty, freedom and vulnerability. Consider a part of your physical self—like your hair, your voice, your hands—and regard it as a separate entity, with its own sense of agency and intention.  Write a poem that observes this thing in as many different ways as possible. Let go of literal sense, and instead think in terms of metaphor—the farther-flung the better. Send this part of yourself out into the world to perceive, to receive, to exert its own presence. Where does it lead you? What does it reveal to you?
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