☀ Today's Poem: "Visitation" Kelly Hoffer

in the dream where I don't know
she is dead, she comes to me and I talk to
her about none of the things I want to
talk to my dead mom about. she traces an oval on a wax tablet.
asked about scale, she answers, the landscape just happened
to be the size of the frame. the visit is shallow or it finds
depth in the places we don't talk. we spend our time
walking over a field robed in cotton. sound moves
fastest in solids. faster in water than
in air. breath, it turns
out, is the slowest medium, and the words I
have are thick in their churning over. the materials
only few and so thin. we share a food
between us. I want
to have a child if only to clarify the image
she weaves—a suit that happens
to be just the size of my body. I sew a shadow
to each petal with a curved
quilting needle. amplitude
and speed, I am telling you, are unrelated. my name
is the last name my mother refused
to change. so as not to lose you, the hospital
lists your name with your mother's on your
baby wristlet. this
life is a repetition that knows
no bounds, tracing a tablet into a waxing
oval that spirals outward. seed of a
seed sowing itself into the ground. this name
just happens to be the size of the concept growing. gesture
is a manner of carrying a body, and space opened
to sky in the recess of her breathing as she
came up from the water, a film
breaking over the ridge of her nose. moving between
water and air, the exhalation faster than her body, I remember
she is dead.

a tree is taken from its halo of
needles. a red candle drops an oval around itself
onto cloth.

from the book UNDERSHORE / Lightscatter Press

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

My poetry collection "Undershore" (Lightscatter Press 2023) is structured around a series of “visitations,” or imagined encounters with my mother after her death from breast cancer. The book’s title “undershore” describes the location of these visitations, a space that is liminal, submerged, dreamlike—interior to the self while also at the edge of the self. Grief, in my experience, comes in waves; I hope the turns and returns of these visitations throughout the manuscript reflect this tidal movement.

Kelly Hoffer on "Visitation"

Clyde Virges congratulates Antonio López

"Combining Poetry and Politics": New San Mateo County Poet

"As a storyteller, López wants to reshape the longstanding narrative about East Palo Alto and its residents, dismantling stereotypes on race, class and economic status. In 2021, López published Gentefication, a poetry collection narrating his youth and coming of age in East Palo Alto while expanding his relationship with his race, identity, class and spirituality. His book was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gregory Pardlo for the 2021 Lewis Prize in Poetry, published by Four Way Books, for his work that 'adorns novelty with innovation.'"

via THE DAILY JOURNAL

READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES

Color cover image of Chloe Garcia Roberts' book, Fire Eater

What Sparks Poetry:
Chloe Garcia Roberts on Language as Form

"I’ve always enjoyed the thought of writing as a force that could effect the inversion of that arrow, the timeline, with its incessant forward hurl. For this piece though, I wanted to attempt to use my subjective experience as a basis for objective conclusions. I dreamt about writing poems that were lightly disguised as a proofs. 'Temporal Saturation' is the first poem in Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology, and it is the template that I used for writing the rest of the book. The first part of the poem is analytic and the second lyric but neither section can exist without each other, they are one."

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.

© 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency