☀ Today's Poem: "The Reversal" Leila Chatti

June 15, 2022

A man who tries very hard to love me convinces me
to leave, for the first time

in days, my bed—to go outside
to see the frozen lake. And, despite the grandeur of the vast white

field, and the novelty of boys walking across it
like novice deities, I am most interested

in the geese. Look at them
sleeping, I say, nodding

to where they rest in a line along the edge of the ice, where the ice is
turning back into water

in imperceptible degrees, the heady blue
encroaching. And I, still

addled by grief, still immoderately exhausted by being
alive, consider (who knows why

my mind does anything it does) how the world could be
flipped—blue lake for blue

sky, birds and feathered
hunks of ice like clouds—

and I think then, naturally, of myself
in this reversal, standing

suddenly atop the firmament,
one of heaven's citizens, perhaps now an angel, perhaps someone

waiting in the long queue
to be seen. And I consider what this would mean

for me, my options. Once, someone
who loved me fiercely fiercely

said the dead
have no options, Leila, they're dead! And the angels do nothing

but God's will, loitering in the interminable meantime
useless as pigeons.

Here, the geese sleep at the edge
of the thaw, unbothered. And winter

and the boys forge ahead. And the man goes on
loving me, in the periphery. So I right the earth. I stay there

as long as I can bear, looking at it.

from the journal KENYON REVIEW

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

Forward

I'm interested in tricks the mind plays. Depression is one of these tricks; it is a lens that distorts the world. My mind does many wonderful things, is capable of leaps of imagination and association, but these feats exist alongside a force that sometimes makes it difficult to be and stay alive. I've never liked the admonition against admitting "this really happened"; this is a poem about a day in which my mind shifted a little, ultimately for the better.

Leila Chatti on "The Reversal"

"Christopher Soto Believes in Poetry, Not Prisons"

"Soto's new collection unsettles the police state's myth that abolition is an impossibility. Defenders of the carceral state often ask: What should be done with people who have committed acts of violence if not imprison them? The poet's work drives at the hypocrisy inherent in that very question. 'This difficulty in uniformly naming violence is part of what makes an abolitionist imagination so necessary to me,' Soto explains."

via THEM

READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES

What Sparks Poetry:
Leah Nieboer on Hillary Gravendyk's Harm

"I keep reading it because it makes me desire its inevitable cyborgs and monsters, its palpitated time-signatures, its 'pink dreaming riot.' I, too, want to get weaved in. Or—I am already weaved in, and desire a present, and future, that is livable with, and inclusive of, a chronic error-measure. Give me less of that narrative 'cure' imposed 'across an abrupt jumble of absences' and more of this speculative wildness."

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