Two Poems
Tom Postell
I Want a Solid Piece of Sunlight
and a Yardstick to Measure It With


Seventh Avenue fills at noon with a gray tide of
   suits come out for air.
Noon catching fire peeks over the high rooftops
   and spits into the saloons.
The brown buildings drip with wilting plaster and
   the mighty pigeon's dung.
Sylphindine Fifth Avenue trips on red and green
   lights and slides quietly by Central Park.
Honeysuckle leaps over the hedges as the people
   leave Staten Island for work.
Long Island slides in its channel groaning under
   the new load of grinding storms.
I see the Brooklyn Dodgers on Times Square with
   their bats and balls practicing.
Let us enter the redundant oasis which rips of
   jungle beats on glasses of gin.
We never get on the train that stops to let the
   morning messenger in.
And with rats digging in the cellar the basement
   cement crumbles as we rise.
Lakes of icy whispering trees float crunchingly on
   under the glory of wide blue sky:
O give me a solid piece of sunlight and a yardstick
   of my own and the right to holler.
I don't need to ask for the moon cause I love some-
   thing that melts in your breath.



Who I am

Kunzite
kissing bug
loud night
my kit of mornings safely tucked away
dolphin of my heart
. . . swim
kissing bug
O my martingales of laughter
. . . find me
here where I hide laughing even at you
ugly mind
dome of Santa Maria della Salute, Venice
things swell like this eternal doomsday
. . . delighting me
you have an idea who I am now, do you not
kissing bug
loud night
my day's dolphin drifting thru the west
from the book TOM POSTELL: ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF AN AMERICAN MASTER / The Unsung Masters Series
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Something about Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
2024 National Book Awards Winners

"Lena Khalaf Tuffaha won the National Book Award in Poetry for Something About Living from the University of Akron Press.  Each winner receives an award of $10,000 and a bronze medal. The National Book Awards are presented by the National Book Foundation to recognize the best literature published each year in the United States."

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What Sparks Poetry:
Lloyd Wallace on What Keeps Us


"The sub-title of this installment of What Sparks Poetry is 'Poems to Read in Community.' The Poetry Daily team convened this semester, inspired by C.D. Wright’s “What Keeps,” to select a group of twenty poems, most from our last year of publication, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, to oneself. In last year’s version of this feature, Kerry Folan said the poems selected were meant to 'offer sustenance.' Roque Dalton did say that poetry, like bread, is for everyone. And I still think that holds true."
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