- POEMS

- COMMENT

- FRANK X WALKER: KINFOLK

POEMS

- Editor’s Note, January/February 2026

- Proof

- The Before Picture

- Document

- Sentences

- The News

- 9

- 9

- 11

- 11

- 112

- 112

- 218

- 218

- 219

- 219

- On Translating Ricardo Reis

- Q&A

- Kissing Cousins

- Court-Ordered Group Therapy: Week 36

- Good Chip

- Expression

- Whatever You Need

- Vanishing Point

- Kingdom

- Salt Sky

- “Jerry wants to argue about the existentialists again”

- “Other women’s husbands are complete sentences.”

- “Must have let out a now-I’ve-seen-it-all sigh when,”

- “The marriage behaves, the business behaves, so what?”

- “When I imitate myself, I am a number of certain people,”

- telling my lover not to evacuate the fire i am fighting

- This Must Be That Place

- Routines

- Wheat and Chaff Rhumba

- Against Hope

- The Leaving

- Desert Hearts, 1985

- skilled trade

- I am not trying to be a man how [“my west-facing window”]

- I am not trying to be a man how [“birdsong isn’t trying to be”]

- My Hispanitude

- We Play Paradise with Poppy Seeds

- At Seventeen

- From “blush”

- Lynchian: a moving shadow

- January Poem

- Apologetic

- Thrilling Conclusion

- The Orchard

- À Bout de Souffle

ADRIAN MATEJKA | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Editor’s Note, January/February 2026

Despite our magazine’s international platform and global curiosities, we stay a uniquely Chicago endeavor.

By Adrian Matejka

Originally Published: January 12, 2026

As many readers know, Poetry magazine was founded in Chicago, and despite our magazine’s international platform and global curiosities, we stay a uniquely Chicago endeavor. The editorial work we do is propelled by the sounds and architectures of the city because this city is inescapable. We can’t help but respond to the way streets like Superior, Halsted, Damen, Division, Lake Shore, and the lake itself are conduits for Chicago’s attitudes and expectations. This city, as icebound and frigid as it is this month, remains poetically in tune and undeniably hip despite the proliferation of puffers and parkas. The saxophonist Cannonball Adderley could have been talking about these area codes when he said, “Hipness isn’t a state of mind. It’s a fact of life. You don’t just decide you’re hip.” Chicago isn’t something you decide; it’s a fact of life, even if you aren’t originally from here.

I’m going on about Chicago because our editorial team has been thinking about what it means to be a magazine that has always been situated in the city of Gwendolyn Brooks. While we have offices in River North today, it wasn’t always that way. Poetry was housed at 543 Cass Street originally; it was later housed in an office on the South Side and in a one-room situation in the basement of the Newberry Library among other couch surfing, co-tenet locations. In honor of Poetry’s migratory past and its 115th anniversary, as well as the 190th anniversary of the city of Chicago, we are planning a series of Chicago-focused issues for 2027. There will be a call for submissions for those issues soon, and we hope you will join us in celebrating this incomparable city and the poets who versify here.

Whether for editors or writers, place and poetics are inextricable. The issue you are reading includes Chicago native and former Illinois poet laureate Angela Jackson, whose poems are thick with the city while not even mentioning it. The poetry of Frank X Walker and his founding of the Affrilachian Poets reflects, as Kelly Norman Ellis puts it in a folio curated by Megan Pillow, “the way land and place nourish memory.” Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s beautiful poem “My Hispanitude” begins “I speak in the fold of the map—/creased between empire and salt” which is also a location that many of us can imagine as our coordinates, wherever we may live in this part of the planet. What do the streets we cross, the buses and trains we take, the park monuments we ignore or embrace, the mostly mediocre sports teams we cheer for, and the accents we carry say about our respective homeplaces? We’ll leave it to the poets to answer for us.

Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. Matejka served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018–19, and he became the editor of Poetry magazine in 2022.

Matejka is the author of several collections of poetry, including: Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize; Map to the Stars (Penguin, 2017); The Big...

Read Full Biography

Next In Issue

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1749507/editors-note at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:26 AM EST.

CORNELIUS EADY | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Proof

By Cornelius Eady

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Cities & Urban Life

History & Politics

Optimism

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

Written for the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani, Jan 1, 2026, NYC.

You have to imagine it:

Who said you were too dark/too

Large? Too queer/too loud?

Who said you were too poor/

Too strange? Too fat?

You have to imagine it:

Who said you must keep quiet?

Who heard your story, then

Rolled their eyes?

Who tried to change your name

To invisible?

You’ve got to imagine:

Who heard your name

And refused to pronounce it?

Who checked their watch

And said “not now”?

James Baldwin wrote:

“The place in which I’ll fit

Will not exist

Until I make it.”

New York, city of invention,

Roiling town, refresher

And re-newer,

New York, city of the real,

Where the canyons

Whisper in a hundred

Tongues,

New York,

Where your lucky self

Waits for your

Arrival,

Where there is always soil

For your root.

This is our time.

The taste of us/the spice of us

The hollers and the rhythms and

The beats of us.

In the echo of our

Ancestors,

Who made certain we know

Who we are.

City of Insistence,

City of Resistance,

You have to imagine:

An Army that wins without

Firing a bullet,

A joy that wears down

The rock of no.

Up from insults,

Up from blocked doors,

Up from trick bags,

Up from fear/up from shame,

Up from the way it was done before.

You have to imagine:

That space they said wasn’t yours.

That time they said you’d never own.

The invisible city lit, on its way.

This moment is our proof.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1761421/proof at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:26 AM EST.

MAGGIE SMITH | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Before Picture

By Maggie Smith

Poem categories

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

It’s complicated, my relationship status

with progress. I often prefer

the “before” picture. The future

is where I’m going only because

I have no choice, because time

moves in one direction, dragging

a bit of itself behind like meat.

An unseen hand keeps

tugging it—time’s rabbit leg,

time’s hunk of red venison—

just out of reach. Did I just describe

the future as bait? Am I strung

along? I know, when I arrive there,

it won’t be there. Won’t be that.

It’ll be now, the way it is

right now. And again. Refresh,

refresh, refresh. The befores

pile up behind me. It’s now again.

Notes:

“The Before Picture” copyright © 2026 by Maggie Smith. From the forthcoming book A Suit or a Suitcase by Maggie Smith to be published by Washington Square Press/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749511/the-before-picture at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

MAGGIE SMITH | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Document

By Maggie Smith

Poem categories

Living

The Mind

Memory & Nostalgia

Time & Brevity

The day is winter bright. I blink against it.

Each time the sun glints in my eyes,

each time I close my lids & let them go

orange & freckled with light,

my mind files it into a folder

that contains every other time

it’s happened before: folders nested

inside folders going back, I imagine,

to one morning standing in my crib,

waiting for my mother to reach down

& lift me out, the sun keeping me

company until her arms appeared.

In the file: sun, sun_2, sun_3,

sun_75, sun_700. Each a document

I can return to & open, even revising

old experience with new thinking.

As if the eye has its own memory—

not the mind’s eye but the eye’s mind—

cataloging material it claims as its own.

Cataloging as long as I live. Sun_7000,

sun_final, sun_final_revised, sun_final_final.

Notes:

“Document” copyright © 2026 by Maggie Smith. From the forthcoming book A Suit or a Suitcase by Maggie Smith to be published by Washington Square Press/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749639/document at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

DĀSHAUN WASHINGTON | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Sentences

By Dāshaun Washington

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Cities & Urban Life

Crime & Punishment

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Disappointment

My mother kept a chest of letters

my father sent me from prison.

She didn’t let me see them

until I was old enough to read

profanity. Every letter, written

in all caps with blue ink

blotting out every other word.

He signed each letter: Love,

Shy Boogie. That was the name

he claimed he got from the Bronx,

known back then as the Boogie Down,

where he bought the crack

he’d sell back home.

I don’t remember exactly how

many years my father spent inside

and I never bothered him

with such questions. But

I once asked my mother how long

my father was in prison before

he got out on parole. With an attitude

you’d expect from someone

tired of talking about that man,

she snapped, not long enough.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749515/sentences at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

DĀSHAUN WASHINGTON | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The News

By Dāshaun Washington

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Cities & Urban Life

Living

Death

Sorrow & Grieving

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Grief

The news said an unidentified man died today

in an accident involving several stray bullets,

fired from the gun of a plainclothes cop,

embedded in the man’s chest and head and arm,

and though this man looked just like you,

I thought not of you, but of your mother

who raised three kids she outlived

and still kept living, and I know

this man the news said died is not you

because you died long before today,

but I couldn’t help but think of your mother

and pray that she’s okay.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749513/the-news at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

RICARDO REIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

9

By Ricardo Reis

Translated By Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

Poem categories

Living

Death

Growing Old

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Types/Modes

Ode

Joy & Contentment

19.6.1914

Sabio é o que se contenta com o espectaculo do mundo,

E ao beber nem recorda

Que já bebeu na vida,

Para quem tudo é novo

E immarcessivel sempre.

Corôem-no pampanos, ou heras, ou rosas voluteis,

Elle sabe que a vida

Passa por ele e tanto

Corta á flôr como a elle

De Atropos a thesoura.

Mas elle sabe fazer que a côr do vinho esconda isto,

Que o seu sabôr orgiaco

Apague o gosto ás horas,

Como a uma voz chorando

O passar das bacchantes.

E elle espera, contente quasi e bebedor tranquilo,

E apenas desejando

Num desejo mal tido

Que a abominavel onda

O não molhe tão cedo.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749519/9 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

RICARDO REIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

9

By Ricardo Reis

Poem categories

Living

Death

Growing Old

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Types/Modes

Ode

Joy & Contentment

Translated from the Portuguese

19 June 1914

Wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world,

Who, when he drinks, has no memory

Of ever having drunk before,

For whom all is new

And forever imperishable.

Crown him with vines or ivy or with twining roses,

He knows that life passes

By him and through him

And that both he and the flower

Will fall to Atropos’s scissors.

He knows, though, how to conceal this fact with red wine,

And uses its orgiastic savor

To blunt the taste of the passing hours,

Like a voice grieving for

The passing of the bacchantes.

And he waits, this tranquil drinker, feeling almost content,

With just one wish,

If indeed it is a wish,

That it does not break over him

Too soon, that odious wave.

Notes:

Translation copyright: Copyright (c) 2026 by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. Used by permission of New Directions.

Read the translator's note by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749517/9 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

RICARDO REIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

11

By Ricardo Reis

Poem categories

Nature

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Types/Modes

Ode

12.6.1914

Coroae-me de rosas.

Coroae-me em verdade

De rosas.

Quero ter a hora

Nas mãos pagãmente

E leve,

Mal sentir a vida,

Mal sentir o sol

Sob ramos.

Coroae-me de rosas

E de folhas de hera

E basta.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749521/11 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

RICARDO REIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

11

By Ricardo Reis

Translated By Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

Poem categories

Nature

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Types/Modes

Ode

Translated from the Portuguese

12 June 1914

Crown me with roses.

Yes, really, crown me

With roses.

I want to hold the hour

In my hands paganly,

Lightly,

Barely feeling life,

Barely feeling the sun

Beneath the branches.

Crown me with roses

And with ivy leaves,

Nothing more.

Notes:

Translation copyright: Copyright (c) 2026 by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. Used by permission of New Directions.

Read the translator's note by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749523/11 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

RICARDO REIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

112

By Ricardo Reis

Poem categories

Living

Death

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Types/Modes

Ode

2.9.1923

Não quero recordar nem conhecer-me.

Somos demais se olhamos em quem somos.

Ignorar que vivemos

Cumpre bastante a vida.

Tanto quanto vivemos, vive a hora

Em que vivemos, egualmente morta

Quando passa connosco,

Que passamos com ella.

Se sabe-lo não serve de sabe-lo

(Pois sem poder que vale conhecermos?),

Melhor vida é a vida

Que dura sem medir-se.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749525/112 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

RICARDO REIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

112

By Ricardo Reis

Translated By Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

Poem categories

Living

Death

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Types/Modes

Ode

Translated from the Portuguese

2 September 1923

I do not want to remember or to know myself.

We just get in the way if we look into who we are.

Not knowing we are alive

Is quite enough of life.

The hour in which we live is just as alive

As we are, and also equally dead

When it passes along with us

As we pass along with it.

If knowing this is of no help in knowing this

(Because otherwise, what’s the point of knowing ourselves?),

The best life is the life

Lived out unmeasured.

Notes:

Translation copyright: Copyright (c) 2026 by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. Used by permission of New Directions.

Read the translator's note by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749527/112 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

RICARDO REIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

218

By Ricardo Reis

Poem categories

Living

Death

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Types/Modes

Ode

Joy & Contentment

11.10.1934

Amo o que vejo porque deixarei

Qualquer dia de o ver.

Amo-o tambem porque é.

No placido intervallo em que me sinto,

Por amar, mais que ser,

Amo o haver tudo e a mim.

Melhor me não dariam, se voltassem,

Os primitivos deuses,

Que tambem, nada sabem.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749529/218 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

RICARDO REIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

218

By Ricardo Reis

Translated By Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

Poem categories

Living

Death

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Types/Modes

Ode

Joy & Contentment

Translated from the Portuguese

11 October 1934

I love what I see because one day

I will cease to see it.

And simply because it is.

In this placid interval in which I feel my existence,

More because I love than because I am,

I love both everything and myself.

They could give me nothing better were they to return,

Those primitive gods,

Who also know nothing.

Notes:

Translation copyright: Copyright (c) 2026 by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. Used by permission of New Directions.

Read the translator's note by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749531/218 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

RICARDO REIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

219

By Ricardo Reis

Poem categories

Religion

The Spiritual

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Arts & Sciences

Poetry & Poets

Types/Modes

Ode

13.11.1935

Vivem em nós innumeros;

Se penso ou sinto, ignoro

Quem é que pensa ou sente.

Sou sòmente o logar

Onde se sente ou pensa.

Tenho mais almas que uma.

Ha mais eus do que eu mesmo.

Existo todavia

Indifferente a todos.

Faço-os callar: eu fallo.

Os impulsos cruzados

Do que sinto ou não sinto

Disputam em quem sou.

Ignoro-os. Nada dictam

A quem me sei: eu escrevo.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749533/219 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

RICARDO REIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

219

By Ricardo Reis

Translated By Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

Poem categories

Religion

The Spiritual

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Arts & Sciences

Poetry & Poets

Types/Modes

Ode

Translated from the Portuguese

13 November 1935

Inside us live innumerable others;

If I think or feel, I do not know

Who is thinking or feeling.

I am only the place

Where feeling and thinking happen.

I have more than one soul.

There are more I’s than just I myself.

And yet I remain completely

Indifferent to them all.

I silence them: I speak.

The crisscrossing impulses

Of what I feel and don’t feel

Argue inside the person I am.

I ignore them. They dictate nothing

To the me I know I am: I write.

Notes:

Translation copyright: Copyright (c) 2026 by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. Used by permission of New Directions.

Read the translator's note by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749535/219 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

MARGARET JULL COSTA, PATRICIO FERRARI | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Translating Ricardo Reis

Fernando Pessoa’s most formally disciplined heteronym.

By Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

Originally Published: January 12, 2026

Ricardo Reis, Fernando Pessoa’s most formally disciplined heteronym, emerged in 1914 as a neoclassical Stoic, shaped by Horace’s Latin lyricism—filtered through Stoic and Epicurean thought—and by the lapidary clarity of The Greek Anthology, particularly in Paton’s English translation held in Pessoa’s private library. His odes, composed between 1914 and 1935, culminate in Ode 219—marked simply “R.R.” at the top and center of the manuscript—written shortly before Pessoa’s death in November 1935 and published posthumously. In 15 hexassílabos (six-syllable metrical lines), the evanescence of thought and identity is distilled: “Sou sòmente o logar/Onde se sente ou pensa.”

The five odes selected for Poetry—all posthumous—trace two decades of verse that moves with lexical precision through the vanishing contours of temporality. Favoring transience over transcendence, Reis dignifies impermanence through formal rigor and philosophical detachment. In the Odes, he stylizes Portuguese through lexical archaism and Latinate syntax, often modulating between longer lines such as the decassílabo (ten metrical syllables) and shorter measures like the hexassílabo—as in Ode 112.

Pessoa said of his own heteronym, Ricardo Reis: “He writes better than I do, but with a purism I find excessive…” In translating Reis, we were very conscious of a meticulous mind at work. The language is not difficult, but Reis often expresses himself with a compactness that is hard to preserve in English. In Ode 219, the last two lines read: Nada dictam/A quem me sei: eu escrevo, or: Nothing (they) dictate/to who(m)(I) know (myself to be): I write. Portuguese is more concise than English because one can dispense with the personal pronoun, which also means that (in the last two words, for example) the “eu/I” carries more weight. The opening words of the last line are so concise that it’s hard to resist the temptation to add that implied know myself to be, and we did toy with To the me I know I am, but that would have meant losing the concision. In the end, we opted for: To the me I know, which is only one word longer than the Portuguese. Translation is always a lesson in compromise.

Margaret Jull Costa has translated the work of numerous writers, including Javier Marías, José Saramago, Fernando Pessoa, and Ana Luísa Amaral.

Read Full Biography

Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor. He holds an MAS from the Sorbonne, an MFA from Brown University, and a PhD from the University of Lisbon. As translator and editor, he has published more than twenty books, including the complete works of Fernando Pessoa’s three heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis—co-translated with Margaret Jull Costa,...

Read Full Biography

Previous In Issue Next In Issue

Author

Ricardo Reis

Ricardo Reis was one of famed Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s principal heteronyms. The Reis persona emerged in 1914 as a melancholic doctor and self-taught Hellenist who chose exile in Brazil.

Poem

From the magazine:9

By Ricardo Reis

Wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world,

Who, when he drinks, has no memory…

Poem

From the magazine:9

By Ricardo Reis

Translated By Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari

Sabio é o que se contenta com o espectaculo do mundo,

E ao beber nem recorda

Que já bebeu na vida,

Para…

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1749447/on-translating-ricardo-reis at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

ANGELA JACKSON | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Q&A

By Angela Jackson

Poem categories

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Joy & Contentment

Optimism

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

This question has a sting inside

Like a wasp’s:

Who is beautiful

And who is not?

The Conquerors leave their leavings on our eyes.

We cannot see

Our own pride.

This question has a sting inside

Like a wasp’s:

Who is worthy

And who is not?

When I went there, I was not surprised.

I knew before. They loved only the light.

And long ago I gave my heart to myself

For safe keeping.

And learned to see with my own eyes.

I am beautiful as I am:

Big and brown and bright.

I am beautiful enough

For flowers and gifts and honoring.

The sun loves me best.

Drops down into my skin

And gleams.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749539/q-a at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

ANGELA JACKSON | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Kissing Cousins

By Angela Jackson

Poem categories

Love

The Body

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

Cousin Mildred Willie Mae’s sister came by

And watched us come in and out the yellow house.

A kiss for Mama on the couch.

My sister kissed my mother. Another.

Then a brother. A sister

Kissed a sister. My mother.

Madaddy came in from a Mississippi

Trip. He’d missed her.

And kissed her. We all loved to see

That romantic smooch.

My cousin not a kissing cousin

Said we were the kissingest people

She ever seen.

And puckered up

To give so that she could get

What was going around.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749537/kissing-cousins at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

CHARLIE PECK | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Court-Ordered Group Therapy: Week 36

By Charlie Peck

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Crime & Punishment

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Anxiety & Insecurity

Marcus got sentenced to a weekend, told us

his positive test was off the charts. It was a baby

hit, man. We are beyond jealous, though it’s easy to forget

his own child at home. I’m crowned the new King of Group Work:

Sir Name and Offense. Outside my stupid

yellow bicycle chained to the railing, the fat orange

sun juicing itself on the capitol building. Good Gravy

I tell the counselor when she asks how I feel.

You’ll only be taken seriously if you take yourself

seriously. A clown

mirror at the county fair, my heart

beating itself up over and over, and over.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749543/court-ordered-group-therapy-week-36 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

CHARLIE PECK | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Good Chip

By Charlie Peck

Poem categories

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Solitude

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

My lack of skill, I just hammered the keys. A piano chord,

the overcoat. On a lacquered floor I played the role, wrote

a speech and bore witness. And what’s to show?

Pictures from the coast and two dead fish, my salad

of a brother. If I sound ungrateful, it’s because I am.

I only wanted to be a good chip

off the old block. Instead, I was cold, hard to heart,

the entire fall season a stack of thick sweaters and walks

in the park. If I’m last to the plane, I’m loafed

at the bar, final boarding call. My whole life

just a ride on the flume—

thrill and its splash, then all afternoon

with angry chapped legs. Every heartbreak I slink

around for months, suspicious as a street pup. Rather an empty

belly than a bruised side. When the ship sinks, it’s every man

by himself. If I dance all alone, I’ll always step in time.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749541/good-chip at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

JANE HUFFMAN | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Expression

By Jane Huffman

Poem categories

Living

Health & Illness

The Body

The Mind

The dilemma

is one of expression.

My expression,

my cough, speaks for me.

What I want

to express is very little.

I must express it

over and over again.

My cough,

my expression, speaks

for me. A little blot

of phlegm in the mind.

I must express it

over and over again.

When my cough

is productive, it shakes

a little blot

of phlegm from my mind,

an idea from the back

of the throat.

When it is unproductive,

it wakes me,

a compulsion

without the clarity

of compulsion,

an idea in the back

of the throat.

My dilemma is expression

without clarity,

compulsory to me

as my cough. What I want

to express is very little.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749641/expression at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

TINA CANE | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Whatever You Need

By Tina Cane

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Popular Culture

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Melancholy & Despair

After Sappho

What cannot be said will be wept

what cannot be wept will be bled

what cannot be bled will be buried

what is buried will rot rot rot

I’ve got this Adidas track jacket

with a vibrant print of flowers

exploding all over the polyester

It’s loud but I like it like I like

mashed potatoes in winter the comfort

of it even if sometimes people comment

on it like the man at the gas station did today

That’s a good jacket    he nodded

as he got into his car    Thanks I replied

I have a collection of them    Vintage on eBay

Okay he laughed Fabulous!

Whatever you need

Whatever you need

Which I took to mean my jacket

was a form of weeping thus I wept

as my car got sudsed and buffed

my arms sheathed in exploding flowers

one jacket is enough but I have six

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749547/whatever-you-need at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

JA LENTON | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Vanishing Point

By JA Lenton

Poem categories

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Activities

Sports & Outdoor Activities

Grandfather and I are hurling stones

into Brandy Bay. Round for round,

he beats my distance. Shortsighted,

I don’t even see his shot hit the water.

It’s all in the wind-up, he says mid-spin.

On release, I worry for him. What if he sinks

some passing ship? Could one good pitch

turn the Earth and strike the back of my head?

You’re not watching, he says. I give him

my full attention: casting back,

he drops the stone behind his ear

and, with neat flair, releases nothing.

Now, I’m casting. He’s under a stone.

But as I weigh one pebble against another,

something zips past my sightline

and breaks the sea’s polished lens.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749643/vanishing-point at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

ANDY CHEN | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Kingdom

By Andy Chen

Poem categories

Love

Realistic & Complicated

Living

Health & Illness

Relationships

Home Life

Activities

Gardening

Optimism

On my sixth day of Covid I venture

with tea, a notebook, and the last of the peaches

out back to our tiny plot tucked

in its city alley. I say our but this domain

is yours: you know which day which sungolds

will be ready, what needs pruning, what wildness is better

left unchecked, not to mention where the sugar water

won’t get too hot for the hummingbirds

and their purring hearts, how to stop the squirrels from biting

each green zebra just to spit out its tart flesh

before trying another, and which log to leave across the bottom

of the birdbath so it’s not too deep. I see feathers

floating, meaning something somewhere newly

is clean, glistening from wetness and not just the sheen

of being blessed with flight. Each breath

is lush, every smell at once. I feel starved,

the way one is for everything after realizing the worst

of a sickness is over, and I’m eating each peach

in four bites, gorging on their fullness and the fullness

of the sunlight and the oxygen

released by the honeysuckle overswarming its trellis,

by the bee balm, by the Norfolk pine we used once

as a Christmas tree, by Fred Jr., the cactus

you grew from three inches of Fred, by the banana peppers

you pick and leave in a bowl for me

to slice into my eggs, by the volunteer cilantro (volunteer,

a word I have thanks to you), by the rosebush

branch you guide away from the handrail,

by the dumbcane, by the magnolia

giving shade to the whole kingdom and me

drunk on it all, spilling over like the peach juice

down my chin, like the ink of this fountain

pen bleeding through this cheap paper, the other side

illegible now. You never like the poems

I write about you, but each time I believe

this will be the first. This will be the first.

Like me, everything wants in on what you’ve made:

crickets, two mice you’ve deemed siblings and named, caterpillars

who eat entire milkweeds in hours to build wings from,

and the winged shadows streaking across me, just sky

by the time I look up. Even the neighbor’s pawpaw tree

reaches through the fence, its shadow touching

the oxalis, the ponytail palm, the weeping blue ginger.

I knew so few of these names before you. Even those

I knew I couldn’t point to, and still I need you

to remind me. I need you to remind me

of so much. To not yell at the Sixers game

because the dog hides under the couch. To listen

to my knees when they hurt. To slow down. To give you time

alone. To remember early isn’t always better, which I forgot

that time I snapped at you to wash the basil already

forty minutes before hosting Maggie and Joe, whom you made laugh

all night and waited until after they left

to cry. To slow down. To leave bug bites be,

and because I never do, you planted citronella—

and yes, we’re back in the garden

because you’d rather be here than anywhere. Here,

with our failed attempt at broccoli

and the radishes we planted earlier

than last year when we planted them too late.

Here, with the rain garden we think

can probably handle the rain.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749549/kingdom at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

ALBERTO RÍOS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Salt Sky

By Alberto Ríos

Poem categories

Nature

Stars, Planets, Heavens

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Southwestern

The bright night sky,

Doorway to everything—

In all that black

All those stars:

Salt.

Pinpricks.

White fireworks.

Perlite.

We look up

Pulled into the immensity,

Lifted into the limitless—

As if it were a hole

We are falling into,

Up instead of down.

We stand on the earth,

Breathe in the night.

It is all too big.

We go back inside.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749553/salt-sky at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

LESLIE SAINZ | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“Jerry wants to argue about the existentialists again”

By Leslie Sainz

Poem categories

The Body

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Arts & Sciences

Philosophy

Jerry wants to argue about the existentialists again

but I am purposefully disinterested, alarmingly so.

I want instead to play the Pointing Game.

Dandelions, lemonade, applause—I add the last few weeks to the list

I started just a few weeks ago. Jerry suggests I add the word “meaning”

to the list. The word “contingency.” I tell him I can

write them down, and I do write them down, but the letters

look ashamed to be there. In the shower, my breasts

have their own terse argument. Go lower, go lower, says Gravity.

In the shower, my breasts were so pale they looked spooked.

Youth, violins, dandelions. Pedicures, reefer, apricot cocktails.

I slip into a silk robe, I am thinking of my metabolism

when Jerry says our friends lack authenticity, our friends hide

in their own density. His mind, mine, Venn diagrams.

Wasps, dandelions, dragonflies. Meteors and candles. The truth:

the truth mishandles me. Meaning meaning is on my list,

absence is not, essence is not. Meaning:

the dandelions are gone, we never did plant them.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749551/jerry-wants-to-argue-about-the-existentialists-again at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

LESLIE SAINZ | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“Other women’s husbands are complete sentences.”

By Leslie Sainz

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Gender & Sexuality

The Body

Relationships

Other women’s husbands are complete sentences.

Other women’s husbands are present tense verbs.

Other women’s husbands are conjunctions.

Other women’s husbands are rhetorical questions.

Other women’s husbands are infinitives.

My cunt livens other women’s husbands,

in this way, my cunt is an interjection.

Other women’s husbands use my cunt naturally.

Other women’s husbands believe my cunt sounds real

and like something that people would actually say.

Other women’s husbands agree

my cunt communicates intensity.

My cunt is used much differently than other parts of speech.

My cunt would stand/wait in line for Trish’s husband. (circle one)

My cunt would crouch/kneel to retrieve Trish’s husband

from a low, low shelf. (only one) When my cunt stands up

for love, I need to sit down for myself. My cunt calls this a twist

because it’s the shape the other organs make.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749557/other-womens-husbands-are-complete-sentences at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

LESLIE SAINZ | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“Must have let out a now-I’ve-seen-it-all sigh when,”

By Leslie Sainz

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Popular Culture

The Mind

Arts & Sciences

Photography & Film

Must have let out a now-I’ve-seen-it-all sigh when,

aboard another Mexican Riviera Well-Being Cruise™,

a woman much older than I asked about our involvement

in The Secret. Here’s what I didn’t say: we pocketed $500,000

from the first 200,000 DVDs, Rhonda Byrne is a harpy.

Everything else was said, for I am nothing if not honest,

honesty being a satisfying life experience all its own.

But back to the sigh, which I admit was a little pockmarked,

a little nest for the competing narratives, you see. It’s no secret that

I don’t need facts as much as the average person, which serves me

quite well in this, the business of speaking to and beside destiny.

But as the question transmuted itself (nonphysical to physical),

it was as if I’d foregone my pre-show rituals: the extravagant

low-carb breakfast, the 37-minute bubble bath, the prophet is mic’d up,

the prophet is mic’d up chant. Instead, I remembered reading

somewhere that documentaries are a constant negotiation

between the filmmaker and their viewers. On? Off?

ABRAHAM held me like foam between the records.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749555/must-have-let-out-a-now-ive-seen-it-all-sigh-when at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

LESLIE SAINZ | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“The marriage behaves, the business behaves, so what?”

By Leslie Sainz

Poem categories

Religion

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Anxiety & Insecurity

The marriage behaves, the business behaves, so what?

Fights like eggs boiling, RUNNY

ESTHER, barely set. I say aloud, ABRAHAM

is not dandruff, but he litters the top of my head.

I say with purpose, I sweat an insignificant amount of ABRAHAM

every day, but I increase my ABRAHAM intake every evening,

responsibly. Does this bring to mind my administering

ABRAHAM’s teachings into your muscles or under your skin,

for the low, low price of $23.95? It should,

which is a word worth vaporizing over. Anyway,

Jerry says to me, he says, deep down,

our friends want to be inseminated with the truth, and

I hear him, regrettably, on purpose. Nevermind that

I am the instrument without an instrument,

that the masculine approach to conversion is paranoid, sinister.

Genuinely, when the last “t” disturbed my cochlea, it was like

confusing the ring of the egg timer with the ring of the landline—

humiliating, and vicious, like sneezing the very first sneeze.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749561/the-marriage-behaves-the-business-behaves-so-what at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

LESLIE SAINZ | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“When I imitate myself, I am a number of certain people,”

By Leslie Sainz

Poem categories

Religion

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

When I imitate myself, I am a number of certain people,

some of them certain. I, myself, am a master of certain people

which implies mastery is possible, something to look into,

ESTHER SPYGLASS, ESTHER FILE CABINET. I store in me

a compelling fact: while the Book of Esther is one

of only two books that does not name God,

it is impossible to argue that Esther is unimportant to God.

If I named God, I would name him more like a boat

than a dog, but more like a dog than a dead relative.

Metaphysically, I am more centaur than dog, more centaur

than boat. It was my top half that said: “If you do not fear

death, you lack imagination,” which implies my top half

has mastered the art of speaking. I am a master of certain people

when I imitate myself, when I imitate myself

which parts of me are flattered? I have to believe the stagehand

is testing the lights, but I get to believe that to exist is to test the light.

If there’s a velvet curtain: I will be good when it lifts. God,

I haven’t confirmed my surroundings because I haven’t opened my eyes.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749559/when-i-imitate-myself-i-am-a-number-of-certain-people at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

IBE LIEBENBERG | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

telling my lover not to evacuate the fire i am fighting

By Ibe Liebenberg

Poem categories

Love

The Mind

Memory & Nostalgia

Time & Brevity

Anxiety & Insecurity

Melancholy & Despair

a burn scar

a whole lot of river

there is a freeway  of wind

blowing  the other direction

my god  between you

and the flames

i think  you will be okay

i cannot promise  anything

but i feel safest about

the memory  of last year’s fires

already burning  the acres around you

the cuts  and bruises

of this earth

have not blossomed yet

but i will wait

it looks like

hell  i should be worried

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749565/telling-my-lover-not-to-evacuate-the-fire-i-am-fighting at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:27 AM EST.

SUNNYLYN THIBODEAUX | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This Must Be That Place

By Sunnylyn Thibodeaux

Poem categories

The Mind

Time & Brevity

Relationships

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

For Tim Cohen

Pewter night

with vertical clouds

Mind’s on Albion

and Atlantis

as if our destruction

came before our being

A Dadaist friend

never forgets the vibration

Invisibility comes in

many forms, but smallness

is the most concrete

Notes:

Copyright: reprint “This Must Be That Place” from Sunnylyn Thibodeaux’s Lucky Charms: New and Selected Poems, 2000–2025. Copyright © 2026 by Sunnylyn Thibodeaux. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books. www.citylights.com

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749563/this-must-be-that-place at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

SUNNYLYN THIBODEAUX | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Routines

By Sunnylyn Thibodeaux

Poem categories

Love

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Optimism

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

For Micah

The morning air holds

the rumble of cleaners

Ravens strut through shadows

collecting spilled debris

No Look Backs!

as I am pulled to the Jesus

Freak pamphlets at the free

library and you are calculating

the weight of the world in your mind

Sky has a haze but more blue

than grey. I scan the return of Christ

language for similarities and try

to catch a glimpse of you up

the hill. Met with glare from windshields

as the sun rises a little more. I wave

into the light just in case

Notes:

Copyright: reprint “Routines” from Sunnylyn Thibodeaux’s Lucky Charms: New and Selected Poems, 2000–2025. Copyright © 2026 by Sunnylyn Thibodeaux. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books. www.citylights.com

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749645/routines at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Wheat and Chaff Rhumba

By Charles Bernstein

Poem categories

Living

The Mind

Optimism

Poet categories

1941-1970

Language Poetry

North America

U.S., Mid-Atlantic

For Barbara Anchesci

South of Naples

North of desire

I lost my way

In the middle of a choir

Blinds of clay

Splints of wire

Filaments of no degree

Rumbling ’gainst fire

Silly—something—seraphim

Pickles with feijoada

Graceless curtains, listless spires

Incunabula bound in briars

Show me the baloney

I’ll give you five to one

No percentage clamming up

Or corralling all the liars

Slow motion, sudden moves

Tipsy till the top

Bottoms up: make believe

Dance until you drop

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749571/wheat-and-chaff-rhumba at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Against Hope

By Charles Bernstein

Poem categories

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Poet categories

1941-1970

Language Poetry

North America

U.S., Mid-Atlantic

There is no promise like the present

though the present’s not promise at all.

The grifter flashes a glimmer like it was

a sure thing. Clinging to these turns

blindsides what’s before the eye, a fist

behind dice. I want distraction even

more than you, but both of us lost

the duel when our seconds went missing.

If you let all that superstructure melt

into the air, you can breathe again what’s

there—rather than what you thought

you wanted. Forget everything I’ve said

as long as you don’t mistake lying awake

with trying to get a good night’s sleep.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749569/against-hope at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

GEFFREY DAVIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Leaving

By Geffrey Davis

Poem categories

Love

Heartache & Loss

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Verse Forms

Pantoum

I am in Arkansas, trying to reimagine my voice,

Again and again, beyond all sound

Trojaned with doubt—you did that

So brilliantly for so long, I almost couldn’t,

Again and again, get any sound

To unthink my mind as broken, like you showed me,

So brilliantly for so long, I almost couldn’t

Thank god for Ozark streams I sometimes wandered

To unthink my mind as broken, like you showed me,

For hours, repeating the same four prayers

Or thanking god for Ozark streams, I wandered sometimes

Wanting to soften my life by disarming each breath,

For hours, repeating the same four prayers

(Which, back then, were still loaded with fear)

Meant to soften a life by disarming the breath,

And thank god for good friends who laughed, at first,

(Which, back then, worked to unload my fears)

When I told just how wrong I’d become, how awful,

And thank god for the laughter of good friends, the first

To re-love these hands—but, if they knew what you knew ...

So I told just how wrong I’d become, how awful—

There you go, nearly leaping the bright rails

I need to keep these hands lovable, if they only knew ...

Once time has finished its newest grace,

You won’t be able to find the rails of happiness

I have used to escape you, again and again,

Cloaked by the new grace that time is building

For my tomorrow, this green-gray shore you’ll never know,

Because I will have escaped you already, again and again,

No longer Trojaned with doubt—you did that,

But my tomorrow is this green-gray shore you’ll never know

In Arkansas, where I am reimagining my voice.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749573/the-leaving at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

HAN VANDERHART | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Desert Hearts, 1985

By Han VanderHart

Poem categories

Love

Desire & Passion

Time & Brevity

Passion

Dir. Donna Deitch

flying backwards down the highway

blue shirt knotted at the waist

when desire hunts she says: I’m interested

casino. bath. dance.

the soft bisexual lighting at Pyramid Lake

kissing through an open car window in the rain

when you ask your love for something, make it small:

not for all their life, but, from the train:

“ ... forty more minutes with you.”

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749575/desert-hearts-1985 at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

AISHVARYA ARORA | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

skilled trade

By Aishvarya Arora

Poem categories

Love

Social Commentaries

Gender & Sexuality

The Body

monthly we submit

to butch-barber

praise

hair confetti flicked

from their clipper’s

silver fingers

lunch-date-butch

studies noodle counter

picture menu

my eyes taste butch-

hips squared under

their pressed chinos

later my butch-

lips graze their fade’s fresh prickle

your butch i

kneel to pump

your tire to pet

your dog to rub

your feet

morning butch

grins over the sink

rakes the blade

from jaw to chin

my fingers slot quarters

into the basement coin-op

soon my outsides butch

in the washed goldenrod jacket

stone & not stone, butch-lovers flower

flame-yellow tops

on limber green stalks

slick & poked, magazines appear

in the mail slot

how butch-

lover appears in your dreams

under silver fringe at NOWHERE

butches grope & sway to disco

get hit on by boys too

how our dead suffered?

at the celebration of life we

read erotica minnie wrote

about sucking butch-

fingers when living

you make me butch

when you take my hand

to ask for more

ask again

handsome today, butch-

boyfriend in the slim silver

mirror says to us

hair mussed

my butch-body an archive of my raptures

sports bra tugged up & off, my hands on your chest

a bird’s wings at rest

butch lean back

fold your arms behind your head to stretch

as if you could take off

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749577/skilled-trade at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

AISHVARYA ARORA | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

I am not trying to be a man how [“my west-facing window”]

By Aishvarya Arora

Poem categories

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

my west-facing window

is not trying

to be a TV.

when saturdays sink

behind the hills

in a blaze

fast enough our eyes

detect the earth’s

spinning, we cut

the ceiling lights,

unplug the bedroom’s

string bulbs. the window

becomes our sieve

of stars. in it, my beloveds

drift ambiguous

as new ideas. in me, old ideas

are trying not

to be landscapes.

my desires emerge

like working men

in pinnies. neon pocks

shoveling the hillsides.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

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AISHVARYA ARORA | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

I am not trying to be a man how [“birdsong isn’t trying to be”]

By Aishvarya Arora

Poem categories

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Joy & Contentment

Optimism

birdsong isn’t trying to be

an orchestra   a murmuration isn’t

trying to be a spray

of fighter jets  neither are trying to be

constellations  which don’t compete

with fireflies  who ignite my backyard

in blinking circuitry

my backyard

isn’t trying to be a forest despite

the two Norway maples

despite the wooded  origins of

this square plot  my birth

isn’t my only origin  isn’t the only

gate I charge through

the gate to my house  isn’t a mouth

the windows not eyes  my mouth is

not a home for my speech  my song

appears only when it leaves me

how I caw

when displeased

yet my displeasure isn’t

my compass  its sense

of direction  despicable  my pleasure is

my pinwheel  spangling light everywhere

my pinwheel is my compass

four vanes spinning  how walking fast

I see versions

of my body  in vestibule mirrors

in wet car windows  in automatic shop

doors gliding open

my body trained to do  an impression

of a tree  doing an impression

of wind  doing an impression

of a person  moved to dancing

by the swelling crescendo

of questions  until the rehearsal stops

today isn’t  a stage

despite my desire  to secure

the curtains  open in red

velvet rope  to let

the floor lights  shine me

to feel the breath the belief

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749581/i-am-not-trying-to-be-a-man-how-birdsong-isnt-trying-to-be at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

DARREL ALEJANDRO HOLNES | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

My Hispanitude

By Darrel Alejandro Holnes

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Race & Ethnicity

History & Politics

I speak in the fold of the map—

creased between empire and salt.

Mother braided three names into my hair,

none of them white.

I carry a chair made of silence—

its legs, the Grito de Dolores,

its seat, a tongue bitten in school.

My voice is a garden

planted in the ruins

of a burned-down convent,

mint growing wild in the mouth of a well.

They said my Spanish was broken.

But what they heard was

Arabic echoing through stone,

a gitano’s guitar wailing in the square,

Yemayá surfacing between syllables,

the baobab tree’s roots itching for a stretch,

the duppy eating akee and saltfish in my voice.

My Spanish is the color of rust in a sugar boiler.

It smells like tamarind and the sweat of mango pickers,

ginger for saril and sap from the sugarcane.

Each word I say contains another—

one for the father who kissed their child goodbye in Yoruba,

and one for the conquistador who renamed him Juan.

I showed them my skin,

called it a palimpsest.

I opened my mouth

and invented bolero with

a hundred eguns in my breath—

some who danced, some who prayed,

some who never made it off the boat.

I write with the red pen they used to grade me wrong,

and eat the drunken fruit that fell from the family tree

they said I didn’t belong to.

Only as a scar belongs to the blade.

Do not bow

to the marble statues of the crown

or kiss the cracks.

My Hispanitude is not your cathedral.

It is the shadow behind the altar, greater than the thing itself.

The laugh that survives translation.

I return to the page like a field after fire—

charred, yes, but stubborn.

Full of many seeds in my locs

that they intended to never survive,

where every rejection

birthed a refrain.

Call it exile. Call it inheritance.

Call it what remains

when nothing fits

but the mouth that says it anyway

and becomes its own unplace.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749583/my-hispanitude at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

DARREL ALEJANDRO HOLNES | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

We Play Paradise with Poppy Seeds

By Darrel Alejandro Holnes

Poem categories

Nature

Social Commentaries

War & Conflict

Time & Brevity

Optimism

For Gaza

Beloved,

we have lost the gardenias

that once trembled

on your collarbone

like soft refusals.

we have lost the zamzam

sliding down your neck

like prayer too shy for language.

the aromatics braided

themselves into your pulse,

then scattered—

like doves trained

in emergency exits.

but in the wind:

salt the color of bomb mud.

not sea. not soil.

something in between

the end and the beginning.

but in the air:

a shinara’s crow

to the blistering sun—

bokra! bokra!

tomorrow!

tomorrow!

we will bloom

even if the bloom is red.

we will bleed

even if the bleeding seeds another field.

tomorrow!

tomorrow!

we plant orchards on rubble,

name each tree after a child

who still dreams

inside the mortar.

tomorrow!

tomorrow!

cactus pears for hearts—

thorned, yes,

but sweet.

tomorrow!

tomorrow!

we play paradise with poppy seeds.

no matter the air strikes,

no matter the bloodshed,

no matter the hard ears,

no matter the dark.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

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CARA DEES | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

At Seventeen

By Cara Dees

Poem categories

Living

Coming of Age

Death

The Mind

Memory & Nostalgia

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

The year the local woman was murdered and her body

fed to dogs, we slipped vanilla gloss over our lips

and catwalked through green apple body spray.

When the news grew thickest, our mother spoke to us

about the nightmares stalking the detectives’ daylight—

because of the way the woman’s bones were pried

apart, because of the houndstooth patterns against

their burnt enamel. Our school spoke of nothing else,

though no one spoke of it. Clumsy sugar-seekers,

we kissed our cotton pillows, lost in the swiftfoot autumn,

doing our best to ignore how the town’s memory

hunted us. Our mother taught us to phone her

when strangers hovered near us, to speak loudly

so everyone knew she guarded us, closed-off

as two lanterns, or seashells, or anything other

than two teenage girls. I hold my daughter now,

and the same dream pursues me—of my mother

standing, alive again above a charging river,

while my sister and I, six and four, swing

from her biceps, laughing. We know nothing

of the stones cutting the waves clean through, or how

truly we’d break open onto them if our mother shifted

her weight. We know only that she is young, gigantic

as the summer we’ve lost, and she does not tremble.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749587/at-seventeen at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

ANNA NYGREN | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “blush”

By Anna Nygren

Poem categories

Living

Youth

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

4.

the woods are the woods are the woods

seaks the dog

play dead to

to come to life

awaken the search

instinct

do ibreath  e

do youbreath  e

give candy

lick the fingers

5.

We lie close

on the leather sofa

skin meets leather

dead against life

you pound my head

in to the breasts

i want to stay

in the warm

is it summer or

only fever

6.

Your sister’s boyfriend calls us

anus-kids, mini-sluts

We know yet nothing

We whisper it in the night

We are the pride glittering

7.

one day

we find

a dead

rat under

the hay in

the stables it

pulls

somewhere inside me

we bury it in

in the grit

it gets

a pile where the ground

don’t want it inside it

Notes:

From blush / river / fox by Anna Nygren, forthcoming February 10, 2026, from Milkweed Editions.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749589/from-blush at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

GEORGE SZIRTES | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Lynchian: a moving shadow

By George Szirtes

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Popular Culture

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Arts & Sciences

Photography & Film

Poet categories

Europe

Northern Europe

England

1

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree,

a late light shifting from the expected place,

all the small insignificant darknesses

that gang up on the imagination. Here they move

with their silent melodramatic shrieks

seeking a wall to touch, and yet persisting

in the darkness of the forest or the road.

2

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree

in field or forest. Here’s the midnight park

behind the empty street. Under the skin,

children are playing, and the train

waits at the station, forever drawing in

to crepuscular music on a stage

with the reddest curtains you have ever seen.

3

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree

with a blonde woman walking away from it

into a room or chair or a fluffy unmade bed

where someone else is sleeping. Someone speaks

in a voice inside a head. It might be hers

or the tree in a landscape of speaking trees.

Must you be so creepy, the voice is saying.

4

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree.

But David, you must stop these endless games,

says the tree. Grow up, David. It’s late

and we have to go to bed. Turn off the music.

Concentrate on the shadows on the wall.

Unpeel yourself from the wallpaper. Sit up.

Lie down. Stop speaking. Shut up. Shut up.

5

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree

in the branches of which hoots an owl. Symptoms

of dizziness. Another stage, more curtains,

more transformations. One finds oneself

by listening. Are you listening, David?

And music pours from the tree in copious bars

as if living were a matter of moving shadows.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749591/lynchian-a-moving-shadow at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

SUZANNE MATSON | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

January Poem

By Suzanne Matson

Poem categories

Nature

Stars, Planets, Heavens

Winter

Only the wrinkle

of a disappearing squirrel

breaks the snow stillness.

The walker, swathed in wool,

lowers toward the prints left

by others, feet that lead to the village.

There a clock stands in front of a closed shop,

its hour not late, though the moon has come early

to mirror the white coin of its frozen face.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749593/january-poem at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

ROBERT WOOD LYNN | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Apologetic

By Robert Wood Lynn

Poem categories

Nature

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Disappointment

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Mid-Atlantic

I loved all the things so much I tried

to stick them one to another. I spit

my gum between the cushions

and the hinges and the nestlings

and the pages. I loved anything, kept it

wadded together. Wanted everything

to be something else too, like a queen

could be a heart, like a heart

could be a fire hazard. To be exactly

what it wasn’t, the way the day could be

an ending. It’s true, I put the rocks back

in the hole the workers dug for the pipes

on account of rocks belonging there

just as much as the water. My mother called

and made me carry them back up,

which it turns out is a lot more work

than throwing rocks in a hole. The day,

it ended. We didn’t. We tricked cards, set

minor fires until they disobeyed our orders

to stay minor. We ran all night. Took

to threatening the moon. That was when

I taped it all together, everything even

my mouth to yours. Until the only noises

we made were the names of birds that died

out so long ago no one remembers

how they looked. Just the sound

we gave to each of them. Sounds which

might even have been the ones they made.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749595/apologetic at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

ROBERT WOOD LYNN | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Thrilling Conclusion

By Robert Wood Lynn

Poem categories

Love

Heartache & Loss

Living

Sorrow & Grieving

Anger

Grief

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Mid-Atlantic

And when the end came it came silent but clear like bird prints on snow

and no one was surprised to see it arrive

and still friends lingered in doorways letting goodbyes go bad

and chirping cats were fed a second time just to be sure

and the family dogs formed a congress in the woods with the coyotes

and someone was careful to leave bubble wrap for children to burst

and the night watchman pretended his glasses fogged over as we passed

and it turned out the trees were unmemorable

and the government a trick of the light

and it was sorry, the ending, but it didn’t know what for

and it was okay at least as much as we were

and we swam with it in whatever we had on under

and we kissed so hard we clanged teeth

and we ate without speaking

and then at last spoke all at once like an unkinked hose

and then it began, the ending, the way all creatures do, small

and angry at its own misunderstandings.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749597/thrilling-conclusion at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

LARRY LEVIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Orchard

By Larry Levis

Poem categories

Nature

Trees & Flowers

Social Commentaries

Living

Death

Sorrow & Grieving

Grief

Melancholy & Despair

I had already decided that a thing could not be seen

For the thing it was, when I looked up & waved my father over.

Beside our orchard of Late Elberta peaches

A picker had hanged himself,

The man was still swaying a little by his necktie.

There was the sound of the tree limb creaking from the weight

It held, & of the bees clustering like a moving gold over

The plain white box of their hive.

And what I noticed then wasn’t the man, but the quiet

Tie with its twisting pattern of polka dots,

Dark brown on a field of white, & how the tie itself had not

Been long enough & so was knotted in a half hitch

To a piece of rope he’d looped over the tree limb before

Sliding the silk of the tie against his neck

Until it was taut. The rope, I remember, had the complexion

Of dust after a rain, & the shadows underneath

The trees kept changing without my actually seeing them

Change; from one moment to another I couldn’t

See them change even if I had watched for that, & only for that.

The act the man had undertaken was ancient, the rope

Ascended to a future without him in it,

And I suppose the necktie was the quiet he wore in going back,

Back & forth between the two, the past & the future.

It was an old orchard of Late Elberta peaches that held a wild taste

That is by now entirely lost, a flavor that once untethered

Everything from what it was—the humming of bees, the dust

Spiraling in shafts of light, the callouses we studied at school,

The faint twang in our English like wind in fence wire, like fate—

I could feel it all come back & turn into light for a moment

When I bit into one, years later, the taste

Of its flesh turning everything except the man who had swayed

In front of me there, into a light

So weightless & so quickly ascending that

For a moment, but only for a moment, I knew what it meant,

Knew what the body meant by swaying there—

No matter what the man who’d tried to make an example of it meant—

I knew what the body meant as my eyes lifted above it.

It meant what was soaring above us, into the limbs of the tree,

& beyond.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749599/the-orchard at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

LARRY LEVIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

À Bout de Souffle

By Larry Levis

Poem categories

The Mind

Memory & Nostalgia

Arts & Sciences

Photography & Film

Poetry & Poets

There is still a photograph of lovers I would like to forget.

After all, the unsentimental oak trees & billboards flash past

On the freeway as I drive home. The photograph

Is by Brassaï & probably it depicts a prostitute & her pimp

On the Boulevard des Invalides in 1934. What her employment was

No longer matters to me or to anyone else, but what troubles me

Is an expression of enormous tenderness & care which covers

Her face as she looks through him. He is handsome, but he is also

In my opinion—nothing, & a star—a blank gust of wind from

Normandy—with his manner as studied & tough as

Belmondo’s was in the first Breathless. The shadows of colonnades

And the shadows over the Seine go past him; he never sees them. And

This punk in the Brassaï print photograph cares more about his coat &

The angle of his cigarette than he does for human life. You

Can see that from the quickest & most indifferent glance.

Probably, it isn’t much of a photograph, but the two of them are

Saying goodbye to each other & neither of them knows it yet. So why

Do I worry about them both? Perhaps I love them; I don’t know.

I am ashamed to admit this, but no woman ever looked at me

The way she is looking at him. Perhaps no man

Could stand it for long if she did. Behind them, it is over &

The street is dark. But still her expression will not change.

It is odd, now, & I envy her, not him. And I know he’s gone

By now, shot down by the police in an alley where the bricks suddenly

Seemed, to his eye, pockmarked by the splashes of cement, full

Of detail & a significance he never had time to figure out.

Both he and his assassin would tell you that the whole thing was a terrible

Mistake, an avenue turning into the indignity of blood

Smeared on brick in curves, arabesques & a spattered constellation of blood—

While the indifferent pigeons strutted about them along the ledges

Of the buildings, & then it was, after all, dawn & they were

Gray in the gray light. Which is what allows him to stroll a while now,

Through the penny arcades of heaven & those little shooting galleries

With the fake ducks, & always a beer on the counter with no one

There to drink it—a beer which no one is given the time

To finish—because, after all, this is heaven & what you see last

You see forever: even if that is only 3 stick figures of blood on brick. And he is

Wind by comparison. That woman still lives here, on this street,

The soft lamplight falling over her face—whose expression,

I suddenly understand, only became serious twenty seconds before

The shutter fell, & enclosed her forever, leaving the rest of us out—

Anyway, it is too cold to leave in the photograph, it is winter,

And, unless you are that woman or I am that man who already owns the pallor

Of the dead, the street is empty for blocks & I couldn’t possibly

Know a thing about either of them. All of which I call my ignorance,

And an obscure, troubled, unphotographable life. I mean, a poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749601/a-bout-de-souffle at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

COMMENT

- Destroying Time: On the Lasting Legacy of Larry Levis

JACQUES J. RANCOURT | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Destroying Time: On the Lasting Legacy of Larry Levis

An intimate and compassionate voice from a lost paradise.

By Jacques J. Rancourt

Originally Published: January 12, 2026

Art by Sonia Pulido.

There is no poet I’ve reread more than Larry Levis, and no poem I’ve reread more than “Caravaggio: Swirl & Vortex” from his long sequence, “The Perfection of Solitude.” The poem opens with an ekphrastic description of Caravaggio’s David & Goliath and expands from there, braiding together the painter’s exile from Rome after being accused of murder, the Vietnam War, and Levis’s high school friend who died in that war after stepping on a landmine. It’s also about something else altogether: the lyric’s ability to suspend time, to contort it, so that Renaissance Italy and an American teenager backflipping into the pool of an empty model home happen simultaneously on the page. The poem opens:

In the Borghese, Caravaggio, painter of boy whores, street punk, exile & murderer,

Left behind his own face in the decapitated, swollen, leaden-eyed head of Goliath,

And left the eyelids slightly open, & left on the face of David a look of pity

Mingling with disgust.

This sentence exemplifies much of what I love about Levis: the maximalist sinew of his syntax, the unspooling parenthetical clauses, the stacking adjectives, the precise images. Just when it feels like weaving together these disparate threads might become unwieldy, Levis sticks the landing with quiet authority:

When I think of [my friend], I get confused. Someone is calling to him, & then

I’m actually thinking of Caravaggio ... in his painting. I want to go up to it

And close both eyelids. They are still half open & it seems a little obscene

To leave them like that.

I was twenty years old when I first read this poem. Although I fancied myself a fiction writer at the time, I was taking a poetry workshop to meet the requirements of my degree. In that class, I was assigned Levis’s The Widening Spell of the Leaves, the 1991 collection in which the Caravaggio poem appears. I had been reading in the library at the University of Maine; it was peak foliage, and the leaves, as Levis would describe in that book, were “the colors of horses: roans, sorrels, duns.” As I made my way two miles outside of town to the sagging steps of my apartment next to a hair salon that no one seemed to ever enter or leave, I couldn’t bring myself to go inside and be among my roommates. I had been haunted, and I knew then that whatever this was, it was the kind of spell I’d been chasing in literature—one I hoped, someday, I’d have the craft to cast myself.

This was 2006, and Levis had been dead for a decade. Despite that gap, he has remained for me and many contemporary poets—including John Murillo, Devon Walker-Figueroa, Jeffrey Thomson, Corey Marks, Terrance Hayes, and Analicia Sotelo, to name a few—a cornerstone. The upcoming release of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems feels less like the consolidation of a historical archive and more like a recognition of Levis’s enduring influence. His lasting power is, I believe, partly because of the way he ignited a new mode of confessionalism. We often associate confessionalism with the midcentury shock-the-bourgeoisie poems of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, and while there are moments of blunt surprise in Levis’s work (“Because they could not blind him twice, they drove a pencil/Through the blind king’s ear” from “The Smell of the Sea,” for example), I refer to “confessionalism” in its original, religious definition.

Quote: I had been haunted, and I knew then that whatever this was, it was the kind of spell I’d been chasing in literature—one I hoped, someday, I’d have the craft to cast myself.. Unquote.

I had been haunted, and I knew then that whatever this was, it was the kind of spell I’d been chasing in literature—one I hoped, someday, I’d have the craft to cast

myself.

Levis is, to my mind, a deeply Catholic poet, though not for his imagery or motifs or even his Catholic upbringing. Rather, there is a catechistic logic to Levis’s poems: memory, confession, penance. The emotional texture of his later work often derives from the need to reckon with one’s choices and with time. Even his diction hums with liturgical vocabulary: loss, testify, darkening, late, exile. An anxiety over banishment from a kind of Eden haunts his poems, serving to fuse this mythological archetype with his own intimately personal account. Another way to put it: he seeks absolution through language. “My only advice is not to go away./Or go away,” he writes in “City of Light,” “Most/of my decisions have been wrong.” In a Levis poem, there’s often the sense that a paradise exists, one that could be inherited or cultivated, and that the poet has, by his own volition, already lost it.

In “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” a surrealistic moment occurs, as it frequently does with Levis, after the speaker confesses his affair. He states that if his house caught fire and if one of the bystanders asked if he knew this other woman, he—like Peter denying Jesus—would say no. But if that fire eating his home had addressed him directly, he would confess the truth:

if that flame could speak,

And it said to me: “You loved her, didn’t you?” I’d answer,

Hands in my pockets, “Yes.” And then I’d let fire & misfortune

Overwhelm my life.

Analicia Sotelo reads “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” a poem by Larry Levis.

As David St. John—a longtime friend of Levis and one of the figures instrumental in bringing his posthumous work to light—points out in his afterward to Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze (2016), Levis often closes his poems with a reckoning by fire, whether that be a purifying, revelatory fire, such as in “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gates,” or an inferno of damnation, as in “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire.” Even the tender poem about his son that concludes The Darkening Trapeze, “God Is Always Seventeen” (which throws us back to “The Poet at Seventeen,” the opening poem of the 1985 collection Winter Stars), ends with this disclosed, stricken sense of loss and an ache for penance:

there was

Some music playing & something inconsolable

And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget

Being there with [my son] & hearing it & wondering what was going to become of us.

This ability to elevate personal vulnerability into lyric is one of the many ways I see Levis’s influence echo through the poems written by my generation. Since his death, poetry has moved ever more visibly toward the personal, especially in poems rooted in identity. While the convention of the “speaker” still exists as a kind of protective veil, many contemporary readers assume, or even crave, a closeness between poet and poem. If this has become a hallmark of twenty-first-century poetics, then Levis can be read as a blueprint of how to draw from one’s inner life—even the ugly parts—with emotional precision that doesn’t tip into self-indulgence.

Additionally, as a white, cisgender, heterosexual man, Levis modeled a way to write with political empathy not rooted in performance. Having grown up on the farms and vineyards of Central California, where he worked side-by-side with laborers from Mexico, his poems offer a tender awareness that is needed in our own political moment. Take this excerpt from “Elegy with a Sprawl of a Wave Inside of It”:

A mile from where I was born, there was a labor camp

That housed a thousand migrant families

In chicken sheds, white leftover feathers & the stucco

Of dung still there,

With its odor of ammonia rising into the dust & spreading

Into the light & air.

It made it hard to breathe it in,

Their fingers, clinging to chicken wire as they stared out,

Whole families, waiting.

.................................

“What was that, anyways?” That was 1955,

Whole families in cages.

“It was a disgrace,” I answered.

And yet it would be wrong to categorize Levis as a political poet. While his early work has a decidedly political bent, he escapes easy categorization. He’s a personal as well as a public poet, deep-image yet cerebral, a confessionalist and a surrealist. His lines and sections sprawl, yet there’s a tight tension, a flammable friction between his line breaks, woven narratives, motifs, and juxtapositions. His poems are somber and contrite, yet at times they can be funny as hell, too, as in these lines from earlier in “Elegy with the Sprawl of a Wave Inside of It”: “August Sebastiani kept a pair of black squabbling swans./He was friendly, they were not.”

A memory: every Monday after workshop during my MFA, poets would rendezvous at The Old Fashioned, a whiskey bar in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, where we’d order pitchers of Spotted Cow and plates of deep-fried cheese curds and talk shop. Those conversations, touching on everything from poetry gossip to debates over aesthetics to who’s the Whitman of the modern era (Levis, obviously, I argued), were my education as a poet. Walking home during the winter, I sometimes cut across the surface of frozen Lake Monona, and trudging across that wide, pale field of frozen water and looking at the stars that thickened above me, at times felt like being inside a Levis poem. On one of those nights at The Old Fashioned, I remember us talking about Levis’s choice in his later work to swap out the coordinating conjunction “and” for the ampersand. To me, it wasn’t just a stylistic flourish; it said something more about his work at large.

This shift toward the ampersand came at a pivotal moment in Levis’s career. While his first three books offer glimmers of the poet he’d become, it isn’t until Winter Stars—when the ampersand first appears—that his vision and style crystallize into the virtuoso work we know today. The ampersand embodies one of Levis’s signatures: yoking together two surprising ideas or dyads to complicate and expand each through their pairing. Take lines like “the missing & innumerable stars” from “Anastasia & Sandman,” or “having to imagine everything/In detail, & without end” from “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire,” or “My father died, & I was still in love” from “In the City of Light,” or “The morning will be bright, & wrong” from “Gossip in the Village.” But if we zoom out, this technique is also emblematic of how he fuses different recursive narrative threads, images, and motifs across his long poems and collections. Consider, for example, how the phrase “the sprawl of a wave,” a shape whose image mirrors the curling glyph of the ampersand itself, echoes across all of his later books. The ampersand, quicker than the coordinating conjunction, accelerates the pairing, blurring their edges until they deepen each other.

Is it because we lost Levis so early and so unexpectedly that we continue to hold his poems in such high esteem? In “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” he describes Billie Holiday as “someone/Gone, & therefore permanent,” a phrase that now, in hindsight, one might use to describe Levis himself. But what gives his work its lasting gravity isn’t its mythologization but the way his voice resists that. Nearly three decades after his passing, we continue reading Levis because he presents himself as a fully red-blooded speaker, flawed and vulnerable:

You were young, and you had

Plenty of time:

Going west,

You slept on the train and did not smile.

Under you the plains widened and turned silver.

You slept with your mouth open.

You were nothing.

You were snow falling through the ribs

Of the dead.

You were all I had.

—From “The Spirit Says, You Are Nothing”

When I think of Levis, I think about his observation that Caravaggio painted his self-portrait onto both the decapitated Goliath and the pitying David, who by “murdering the man, is murdering his own boyhood.” Levis’s work operates in this vein, as he casts himself penitently on the page. “Couldn’t it destroy time if [Goliath] offered himself up like this?” Levis asks David. If being read as widely, closely, and reverently as Levis has is one way to destroy time, then he has answered his own question.

Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books, 2021) and Novena (Pleiades Press, 2017).

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Poem

The Poet at Seventeen

By Larry Levis

My youth? I hear it mostly in the long, volleying

Echoes of billiards in the pool halls where

I spent it all, extravagantly, believing

My delicate touch on a cue would last for years.

Outside the vineyards vanished under rain,

And the trees held still...

Poem

From the magazine:

ELEGY WITH A CHIMNEYSWEEP FALLING INSIDE IT

By Larry Levis

Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard

Compose the dark, compose

The illiterate summer sky & its stars as they appear

One by one, above the schoolyard.

If the soul had a written history, nothing would have happened:

A bird would still be riding the back...

Author

Larry Levis

Larry Levis grew up in Selma, California. In his youth, he worked on his father’s vineyard. In 1968, he earned a BA from Fresno State College, where he studied with Philip Levine. He completed a master’s degree...

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1749603/destroying-time-on-the-lasting-legacy-of-larry-levis at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER: KINFOLK

- Beyond Black Appalachia

- Affrilachia

- Canning Memories

- Mass Choir

- Groom

- One-Third of 180 Grams of Lead

- Time Is Thinner than Glass

- Thumb Wrestlers

- Baptism by Dirt

- Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben & Aunt Jemima

- God’s House

- Marking Twain

- Death Rattle

- How to Teach a Child to Pray

- Drive

- “They Seeded Themselves”

MEGAN PILLOW | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Beyond Black Appalachia

Affrilachian evolution and postcolonial community in the poetry of Frank X Walker.

By Megan Pillow

Originally Published: January 12, 2026

Frank X Walker reading at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning, Lexington, Kentucky, circa 2021. Photograph by Shauna M. Morgan.

One of the first poems I ever loved by Frank X Walker was the one that bears the title of the term he made famous. For days after reading “Affrilachia,” this line beat inside me like a drum:

anywhere in appalachia

is about as far

as you could get

from our house

in the projects

yet

What struck me most about this poem were the stereotypes it seems to demolish, the boundaries it dissolves. In these few lines, Frank X Walker—X as I came to know him—illustrates the expansive distance between Appalachia and Blackness but also their enmeshment; he reminds his readers that the two are more aligned than people might initially think. There is more to this poem, more that comes after his “yet”—parallels between the connections to food, to family, the lineage of porches that link all the residents of Appalachia—and to X, it makes them kinfolk.

In 1991, X coined the term “Affrilachia” after discovering that the dictionary defined Appalachians as white residents of Appalachia. He wanted a term that interrogated the perceived distance between his Black space and definitions of Appalachia that required whiteness as a prerequisite. X was born and raised in Danville, Kentucky; his family was one of the few Black families in town, and so he began reading and eventually writing to cope with his isolation and to articulate his experience. That work became more focused once he began his undergraduate studies at the University of Kentucky under the tutelage of the late Gurney Norman, one of Appalachia’s most revered voices. Norman recognized and cultivated X’s talent and his craft, helping him hone his voice and find paths to publication. As his regional reputation grew, X built community with other nearby Black writers and poets. Together with accomplished poets such as Kelly Norman Ellis, Crystal Wilkinson, and Nikky Finney, X formed the Affrilachian Poets. This collective of Black writers and other writers of the global majority felt locked out of the designation of “Appalachian writers” and pushed back against a regional invisibility, trying to define and claim their own space.

As the originator of the term Affrilachia, X’s own writing is also where Affrilachia first comes to life. X likes to tell people that he started as a fiction writer: his first publication was in the University of Kentucky newspaper, a story he wrote in Norman’s class. Norman’s fiction—its narrative deftness, its connection to nature, its meticulous mapping of the interior lives of people and the relationships between them—also migrated into X’s poetry, which is where X has spent much of his artistic energy since his early days as a fiction writer.

I first met X in the summer of 1994. I was a student at Kentucky’s Governor’s School for the Arts, a summer arts program for teens. X was the first person to look at my work and scowl, which initially seemed like judgment but which I soon learned was careful scrutiny. It was novel to be read this way, to be spoken to as if my work had weight. What’s more, I soon learned he treated the whole of my workshop cohort the same way. This is simply the way X shows up in the classroom and in the world.

For many students like me, Frank X Walker is a touchstone, someone whose critique and considered care makes you want to stay in his orbit, and like many students, I orbited. I came back to GSA as a resident advisor for two summers in college and worked for X while he served as the program’s director. I read his work in his first book, Affrilachia, and sought out his work in lit mags; I conjured up his guidance when I attended the University of Iowa for my MFA in fiction. X, meanwhile, published with increasing frequency and acclaim. He moved from GSA to several university creative writing positions before finding his academic home at the University of Kentucky. He won award after award for his work, from the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry to an NAACP Image Award to honors from Cave Canem and the National Endowment for the Humanities; eventually he became Kentucky’s poet laureate, the first Black writer to earn that designation.

When I decided to pursue my doctorate in 2013, I knew the University of Kentucky was where I wanted to be so I might have the opportunity to work with him again. That fall, once again his student, I dedicated myself to learning more about the legacy that X built. In the two decades since I met him, he had become one of Kentucky’s most celebrated writers and revered teachers, as well as one of the country’s most quietly influential Black poets.

Much of the work in X’s thirteen collections of poetry falls into three categories. The first is a broad array of autobiographical poems about family and community, where X ruminates on the bittersweet beauty of children and romantic love, the tragedies of addiction and loss, the complicated connections between family members and friends. The second are poems—some autobiographical—about the interconnectedness of Black people with land and nature, particularly in rural contexts. The third, which comprises six of the books in X’s body of work, are persona and protest poems that bring history into the present and are undergirded by a Black radical consciousness and an eye toward justice. These poems offer a kaleidoscopic rendering of crucial moments in American history through the lens of lives too often footnoted: Lewis and Clark’s expedition from the perspective of Clark’s slave, York, Sacagawea, and other Indigenous voices they encountered; the rise of thoroughbred racing through the voice of Isaac Murphy, the legendary nineteenth century Black jockey; the assassination of Medgar Evers from the perspective of Evers’s widow, his brother, his assassin, and even the bullet that took his life; the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 protests from X’s perspective; and the Civil War through the voices of the Black Union soldiers who enlisted in exchange for emancipation.

The sampling of work included in this folio offers a selection from each of these categories so that readers can understand the scope and evolution of X’s work over the past three decades. His work maintains its roots in the Black Appalachian experience but has branched and blossomed into expansive narratives of love, community, resistance, and reinvention that connect it to the work of other marginalized writers across the globe.

In the past thirty years, X’s work, the term Affrilachia, and the Affrilachian Poets have all become sources of solace and inspiration for a multitude of artists and writers. They all have evolved over time far beyond their original intent and meaning, reminding readers and residents alike of the diverse citizenry of Appalachia, and they have led to a renaissance of Black writers and writing in a region historically dominated by white voices.

The history of Appalachia as a defined region goes back to 1896; since then, its borders have gone through twelve major revisions. As X asserted in a 2016 interview with artist Virginia Rosenberg, “The county I was born in [Boyle County] is one county away from the [Appalachian Regional Commission] definition of Appalachia, but the disenfranchisement and poverty that define [Appalachia] did not stop at the border.” The connection between Appalachia and Affrilachia, noted X, has less to do with exact parallels in geography and more to do with shared values and practices. To Rosenberg he pointed out commonalities between Appalachians and Affrilachians “such as a sense of place, a set of morals valuing family and community, oral traditions, love of music, and puritan work ethic.”

Since 1991, X has found these shared values and practices in other countries where, as in Appalachia, people are resisting colonial domination and the oppressive structures, systems, and stereotypes that facilitate that domination such as poverty, disenfranchisement, educational deprivation, ecocide, and violence. In his welcome letter for the 2019 issue of pluck!—the journal that X established in 2007 at Northern Kentucky University and has published since 2009 at the University of Kentucky—he writes of flying into the country of Eswatini, whose poets are featured in the special issue, and finding not only a familiar landscape, but familiar values: “A love for the family and the land, Affrilachian bedrocks, shined through when my Eswatini students shared their work.” Eswatini, wrote X, mirrored much of what he’s found in his travels, which is a kinship and abiding connection to the neocolonial and postcolonial stories and experiences shared by people around the world:

Being forced to regularly defend a definition of Affrilachia without imposing geographical boundaries on it has been a fight I have welcomed over the almost 30 years of activity of the Affrilachian Poets, but flying over coal mines and into the mountains and landing in the predominantly Black country ... of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland; and reflecting on earlier travel to the mountainous regions of Ghana, Cuba, and Jamaica; and reconnecting with a former University of Kentucky student, who is now in Australia organizing poets and using my pedagogy to teach creative writing to Aboriginal poets of color, has forced me to think of Affrilachia as even more expansive than I had ever imagined.

It is fitting then, for Affrilachia, its people, and its literature to ignore the Appalachian Regional Commission’s (ARC’s) boundaries. Affrilachia is not a geographical space or determined by identity alone. Affrilachian art and literature are also not affirmed by or determined by colonial projects, although they still exist in relation to them. Affrilachia is not a replica of the experience of all Black Appalachians but a Homi K. Bhabha-esque third space, a hybrid creative movement where elements of Black and Appalachian culture meet and blur; where artists with shared values but from varied walks of life create their art, navigate their identities, and plot their liberation; where they resist the strictures of the ARC’s project by building artistic community far beyond the ARC’s reach.

I write this to honor my mentor, to hold up a mirror to what already exists. And now, I hold the mirror of X’s work up to you, readers, to ask you how it might change you, what you might see. I have never and will never inhabit Affrilachia, and yet I cannot escape its influence. Affrilachia and the work of the Affrilachian Poets move through me, and my work is forever changed. But the story of Affrilachia is best told through the work of Frank X Walker and the other poets and writers whose art has meticulously built this movement.

1/6

Young Frank at Tolliver Elementary School, c. 1970. Photographer unknown.

2/6

Frank X Walker reading at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning, Lexington, Kentucky, circa 2021. Photograph by Shauna M. Morgan.

3/6

2019 Kwanzaa Celebration in Lexington, Kentucky, l-r Shauna M. Morgan, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Frank holding Kumasi. Photograph by Shauna M. Morgan.

4/6

Frank and Kumasi observing the fauna on the banks of the Wallowa River, 2022. Photograph by Shauna M. Morgan.

5/6

Frank painting in his home studio as Kumasi plays nearby, 2019. Photograph by Shauna M. Morgan.

6/6

Frank presenting a broadside of “Why I Don’t Stand” to fellow Kentuckian, African American Historian Yvonne Giles, 2025. Photograph by Shauna M. Morgan.

This essay opens the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Megan Pillow is the co-author, along with Roxane Gay, of Do the Work: A Guide to Understanding Power and Creating Change (Leaping Hare Press, 2024) and lives in Kentucky with her children.

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Poem

From the magazine:Affrilachia

By Frank X Walker

thoroughbred racing

and hee haw

are burdensome images

for kentucky sons

venturing beyond the mason-dixon…

Poem

From the magazine:One-Third of 180 Grams of Lead

By Frank X Walker

Both of them were history, even before one

pulled the trigger, before I rocketed through

the smoking barrel…

Poem

From the magazine:Baptism by Dirt

By Frank X Walker

All believers know about the power of water

though not enough about the power of dirt.

My mama used…

Poem

From the magazine:God’s House

By Frank X Walker

When we first left Kentucke

the trees had commenced to dressing up

the fall harvest an the garden

was already…

Author

Frank X Walker

Frank X Walker was born in Danville, Kentucky, and earned a BA from the University of Kentucky and an MFA from Spaulding University. He helped to found the Affrilachian Poets group and served as founding editor...

Glossary Terms

Affrilachian poets

Affrilachian is a word coined by the poet Frank X. Walker to describe African American people of regions in and near the Appalachian Mountains in North America. Walker founded the Affrilachian Poets Collective in 1991, whose members include poets and fiction writers such as Nikki Finney, Kelly Ellis, Paul Taylor, Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald Coleman, and Shana Smith among others. He coined the term to confront the assumed whiteness associated with the definition of the Appalachian region and its residents…

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1749607/beyond-black-appalachia at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Affrilachia

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Class

Race & Ethnicity

Town & Country Life

Arts & Sciences

Poetry & Poets

For Gurney & Anne

thoroughbred racing

and hee haw

are burdensome images

for kentucky sons

venturing beyond the mason-dixon

anywhere in appalachia

is about as far

as you could get

from our house

in the projects

yet

a mutual appreciation

for fresh greens

and cornbread

an almost heroic notion

of family

and porches

makes us kinfolk

somehow

but having never ridden

bareback

or sidesaddle

and being inexperienced

at cutting

hanging

or chewing tobacco

yet still feeling

complete and proud to say

that some of the bluegrass

is black

enough to know

that being “colored” and all

is generally lost

somewhere between

the dukes of hazzard

and the beverly hillbillies

but

if you think

makin’ ’shine from corn

is as hard as kentucky coal

imagine being

an Affrilachian

poet

Notes:

“Affrilachia” is reprinted from Affriliachia (Old Cove Press, 2000) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749611/affrilachia at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Canning Memories

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Town & Country Life

Relationships

Activities

Gardening

Indian summer Saturday mornings

meant project door screens sat open

waiting for the vegetable truck

No new moons or first frosts

just the horn on an old flatbed

trumpeting the harvest

No almanac announcement, no ads

just a short black farmer in overalls

and mud-caked boots

Grandmothers who still clicked

their tongues, who called up the sound

of a tractor at daybreak

the perfume of fresh turned earth

and the secret location of the best

blackberry patch

like they were remembering

old lovers, planted themselves

a squint away from palming

and weighing potatoes

string beans, kale, turnips, sweet corn

onions and cabbage

They seeded themselves

close enough to see each other

bent low in the fields, pulling weeds

Notes:

“Canning Memories” is reprinted from Black Box (Old Cove Press, 2006) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749647/canning-memories at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Mass Choir

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Race & Ethnicity

Religion

God & the Divine

Arts & Sciences

Music

Isaac Murphy

The sound of a race is music but like nothing with

strings or words. You’d need a hundred men with

hammers and women stepping Juba but with both

hands making the body a drum  like in “Hambone.”

Closest thing to it I can imagine would be a whole army

marching in step and singing something like

“The Colored Volunteer” while you listen with your head

inside one of the drums.

Or a large congregation of hands and feet clapping

and stomping together real slow and even in the beginning

and then steadily speeding up but not losing the rhythm

until the whole church is clapping and stomping as fast

as they can and sweat is dripping off their heads and necks

and they all feel like their hearts might bust wide open

but they keep on going faster

and faster and faster  until it feels like God takes over

or a spirit comes down and you are no longer in charge,

just along for the ride.

Notes:

“Mass Choir” is reprinted from Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride (Old Cove Press, 2010) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749649/mass-choir at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Groom

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

The Mind

Relationships

Pets

Activities

Sports & Outdoor Activities

Isaac Murphy

The first time I put my hands on a horse

I pretend like I’m touching a woman

or brushing my mamma’s hair.

I make sure none of the weight

I might be carrying around

is riding with me.

Before I step foot in a stall

I might even stop  gather myself

in the quiet morning air  close my eyes

and picture my Lucy sleeping

or Mamma peeling apples. It’s a lot like prayer,

only I ain’t asking for nothing

but for God to lift my burdens

right off of my hands, so that my touch

is like a mother’s kiss, like a baptism even.

I just want the horse to know my heart

is clean  to feel all my respect,

no fear, and nothing of the heaviness or darkness

that follow even good men around

like the tail do the mane.

Notes:

“Groom” is reprinted from Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride (Old Cove Press, 2010) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749613/groom at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

One-Third of 180 Grams of Lead

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

War & Conflict

Living

Death

Sorrow & Grieving

Grief

Both of them were history, even before one

pulled the trigger, before I rocketed through

the smoking barrel hidden in the honeysuckle

before I tore through a man’s back, shattered

his family, a window, and tore through an inner wall

before I bounced off a refrigerator and a coffeepot

before I landed at my destined point in history

—next to a watermelon. What was cruel was the irony

not the melon, not the man falling in slow motion,

but the man squinting through the crosshairs

reducing the justice system to a small circle, praying

that he not miss, then sending me to deliver a message

as if the woman screaming in the dark

or the children crying at her feet

could ever believe

a bullet    was small enough    to hate.

Notes:

“One-Third of 180 Grams of Lead” is reprinted from Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (University of Georgia Press, 2013) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749615/one-third-of-180-grams-of-lead at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Time Is Thinner than Glass

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Love

First Love

Heartache & Loss

Social Commentaries

Crime & Punishment

Time & Brevity

I had forgotten you were my first kiss

until I see you standing there

behind my sister, waiting     quietly.

Your half smile tells me you remember

too, so I pretend to ignore

the orange jumpsuit swallowing your curves.

In that chasm between my lips

and her ear, I search for words

I haven’t found strength to rehearse.

Hand dancing through two inches of glass,

I manage a “mama’s gone” and watch her

legs quit—her heaviness fold like paper

into your ready arms. The receiver swings

like a dead man. Time bends. I close my eyes

and kiss you, again. This time it’s for real.

Notes:

“Time Is Thinner than Glass” is reprinted from About Flight (Accents Publishing, 2015) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749617/time-is-thinner-than-glass at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Thumb Wrestlers

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Living

Death

Sorrow & Grieving

The Body

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Grief

We held hands for the first time

on his deathbed, which would have been

insignificant had we at least shared

a fist bump, some dap, or a ritual

handshake during any of our times together.

The distance between us always felt

wider because of the unspoken rule

about unsolicited touching. According

to his sister, people always thought

he was a loner, but he was just “private.”

So in his hospital room, surrounded

by unblended families,

I leaned in close and whispered,

then he squeezed and I squeezed back.

It was the loudest conversation

we had ever had. My warm breath in his ear,

our large twin hands entwined and grappling,

inventing our own Morse Code,

shouting all the things

we never found words for.

We held hands for the first time

on his deathbed, but I imagine an infant me,

wrapping all my tiny digits around the expanse

of one of his massive thumbs, like my son

is doing now.

Notes:

“Thumb Wrestlers” is reprinted from Last Will, Last Testament (Accents Publishing, 2019) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749619/thumb-wrestlers at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Baptism by Dirt

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Gender & Sexuality

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Home Life

Activities

Gardening

For Shauna

All believers know about the power of water

though not enough about the power of dirt.

My mama used to walk barefooted

in our vegetable garden,

get down on her hands and knees

and almost pray in the dirt.

My wife and I and our two-year-old

built and planted three raised-bed gardens.

Watching her dip her fingers into the dirt

to coddle what will feed us

reminds me of mama and then.

What is it that women know

about nurturing a seed into a piece of fruit,

about believing in the power of dirt

and suns and water?

I return from our labor with sore knees

and back, fingernails and hands caked with dirt.

She floats back into the house cleaner,

somehow less burdened,

as if she spent the weekend

burying all her heavy things,

as if she whispered to something sacred

and it whispered  something back.

Notes:

“Baptism by Dirt” is reprinted from Masked Man, Black: Pandemic & Protest Poems (Accents Publishing, 2020) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

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FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben & Aunt Jemima

By Frank X Walker

...walk into a bar in America.

Butterworth says, I’m being repackaged.

Ben says, I’m being rebranded.

Jemima says, I remember

when they branded my mama     on her back.

The bartender says, I could stand in the middle

of Main Street and kill somebody

and I wouldn’t lose any voters.

Butterworth says, then I’ll take eight bullets

in my sleep. Ben says choke me to death

with your knee. Jemima says,

lock me in a holding cell and say

I decided to hang myself.

The bartender poured the drinks,

said he felt threatened

and was simply standing his ground

when he thought the thug

was reaching for a gun.

The headlines said Well-Loved American

Foods Resisted Arrest, Failed

to Comply, and Were Delicious While Black.

Butterworth’s daughter said here’s to progress,

we might finally get an anti-lynching bill.

Ben’s son said I’d rather they abolish

qualified immunity. Jemima’s kid said you know

they abolished slavery once,

then they hung my mama     on that box.

Copyright Credit: Frank X. Walker, "Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben & Aunt Jemima" from Masked Man, Black. Copyright © 2020 by Frank X. Walker. Reprinted by permission of Accents Publishing.

Collection

Poetry and Racial Justice and Equality

By Major Jackson

January 15, 2021

Witnessing the struggle for freedom, from the American Revolution to the Black Lives Matter movement.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poems/162299/mrs-butterworth-uncle-ben-aunt-jemima at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:28 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

God’s House

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Race & Ethnicity

History & Politics

Religion

God & the Divine

Activities

Travels & Journeys

The expedition left the Louisville, Kentucky, area near the Falls of the Ohio on October 26, 1803.

When we first left Kentucke

the trees had commenced to dressing up

the fall harvest an the garden

was already full a pumpkins an squash.

Massa Clark didn’t ask me to go on no expedition.

He just say “pack” an pointed to the door.

So I gather up what little I got an more than I can carry a his

an head off to a sail-bearing keelboat

where his friend Massa Lewis is waiting.

That boat was so big

you could lay any ten a the sixteen mens on board

or eight a me head to toe an still have enough

room for the dog.

We start out on the Ohio an swing up the old man a rivers

When we gets to the mouth a the dark woman

they calls the Big Muddy

we sets up winter camp a good canoe ride from Saint Louie.

That spring when the rains come we cross the Mississippi

an commence to climbing the M’soura

an float right up through heaven on earth.

More sky than I ever seen, rocks as pretty as trees

an game so plentiful they come right down to the river bank

an invites they selves to dinner.

Now, I ain’t what you would call

a scripture quoter, but the first time

I seen the water fall at M’soura,

felt a herd a buffalo stampede

an looked down from top

a Rock Mountains, it was like church.

An where else but God’s house can a body servant

big as me, carry a rifle, hatchet ana bone handle knife

so sharp it can peel the black off a lump a coal

an the white man

still close his eyes an feel safe, at night?

Notes:

“God’s House” is reprinted from Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (Accents Publishing, 2022) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749625/gods-house at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:29 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Marking Twain

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Nature

Landscapes & Pastorals

Social Commentaries

Town & Country Life

History & Politics

The second mark on the line that measured a river’s depth, two fathoms, or twelve feet—safe depth for a steamboat

It’s complicated.

Me and the South. Me,

and the land, and the trees.

Whose ever woods these are

are full of hounds, and secrets

and ropes.

These hollers and creeks are all

one American Lit class away from rivers,

and steamboats, and cotton fields.

The difference between hanging burley

from the top rail

and sometimes barely

hanging,

can be as muddy as the difference

between growing up attracted to

any light-skinned girl

with green eyes

and knowing how I got that way.

It’s complicated,

me and the South, me

and the land    and the trees.

Notes:

“Marking Twain” is reprinted from Love House (Accents Publishing, 2023) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749627/marking-twain at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:29 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Death Rattle

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

War & Conflict

Living

Death

Sorrow & Grieving

The Body

Grief

Nobody slept. We just lay there stretched out

on the floor like we did when we were kids,

all lined up like sardines in the same twin bed.

We couldn’t. Our ears were too full of the air

raid that followed the pronouncement of her

imminent death. But she bombed the small room

the whole night, the next day, and the next

refusing to relent, exhibiting the defiance

in a heart that was always the strongest thing about her.

There is no quiet now. Even miles away in the dark

searching for sleep on my own pillow I can still hear

her breathe. I can still see her body swell and jerk,

dragging me back, with a few of my siblings in tow,

praying for no more suffering    and safe passage,

waiting for the sound of her one last breath

—unable to separate it from our own.

Notes:

“Death Rattle” is reprinted from Love House (Accents Publishing, 2023) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749629/death-rattle at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:29 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How to Teach a Child to Pray

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Race & Ethnicity

War & Conflict

History & Politics

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Humiliate her mother at every checkpoint.

Replace the Second Surah with air raids and shelling.

Reduce everything she knows to rubble.

Bury her younger brother under his school.

Laugh when she raises her hands in front of her face

and asks your God for peace.

Surveil her dreams of clean water and fresh bread.

Reduce everything she knows to rubble, again.

Direct her to ignore the smell of decaying bodies

when bowing down to perform Ruku.

Strip search her grandparents in the street

—let her hold their shame.

Expect her gratitude for being able to count

on one hand cousins who have one hand.

Teach her to dread shelters and refugee camps

instead of periods.

Assume her capacity to forgive will be longer

than her memory.

Dare her to stand up and repeat

“ALLAH HU AKBAR.”

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749631/how-to-teach-a-child-to-pray at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:29 AM EST.

FRANK X WALKER | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Drive

By Frank X Walker

Poem categories

Love

Romantic Love

Relationships

Home Life

Activities

Sports & Outdoor Activities

We are two copper spoons

beneath the blanket.

I am listening to my wife’s

gentle breaths.

She is finally relaxed

after a long night of wrestling

in her sleep.

My hand is on her thigh

but I am thinking about

the perfect drive I hit

on number five at Southwind,

and the seven iron to the edge

of the green.

I replay the birdie putt trickling in

to the hole over and over again.

It could be on the golf channel

except there’s no roaring crowd,

no exuberant fan screaming,

“get in the hole!”

no English accent whispering

into a microphone

about the significance of the shot,

how my steady play today

finally reflects my potential,

my work ethic, my readiness

for the moment.

She shifts her weight, the air between

our hips disappears.

I close my eyes.

I am no longer watching the flight

of the ball. I am the ball in flight.

I have been well struck. I am moving

with intention toward the earth.

This is not a game.

And it’s us doing all the whispering.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1749635/drive at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:29 AM EST.

KELLY NORMAN ELLIS | JAN 31, 2026, 7:26 AM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

“They Seeded Themselves”

On Frank X Walker and the power of Affrilachian gatherings.

By Kelly Norman Ellis

Originally Published: January 12, 2026

They seeded themselves

close enough to see each other

bent low in the field, pulling weeds

dispensing verbal insecticide

—Frank X Walker, “Canning Memories”

Frank X Walker has a third eye. The elders would probably say he was born with a caul or the gift of second sight. His is the ability to see other poets and storytellers as they move through the world, unaware of their gifts. These writers muddle through in search of kindred spirits; Frank sees them, these writers rooted in place and generations, these writers who innately understand the way land and place nourish memory and how the ancestors show up in these stories again and again. Frank understands how a place can inform stories.

Frank saw me. He saw Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald L. Coleman. He saw Ricardo Nazario y Colón. He saw Mitchell L. H. Douglass. He saw Shanna L. Smith. In 1992, he saw all of us: Black writers in search of a community in Lexington, Kentucky. Frank and I were graduate students at the University of Kentucky, but some of the others were undergraduates, some were writing press releases for the mayor’s office. Some were selling used cars. Some were budding philosophers, but Frank saw a generation of Black writers searching for our true selves, our true voices.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Cultural Center at UK was the center of our world. Every Monday night from 6 to 8 pm, we young Black writers shared and critiqued poems, plays, fiction, even song lyrics. We vibed, and we rhymed off the dome. We cried over frustrations and rejections. We got mad at each other. We jammed ourselves into service elevators and turned off the power so we could recite our ditties and jubilees to one another. Sometimes there were five of us, and sometimes two sharing that small space. We gave each other daps and snaps then turned the power back on and returned to class or work. We shared Nikki Giovanni and Gayl Jones, passing Corregidora around like a sacred text. We wrote. And Frank made sure we were beholden to each other: bonded to place and people. He encouraged our pure agency. We organized open mics and shared calls for writing from everywhere. “Here, this may be good for you,” we said. When Frank looked across the workshop table and said, “What did you bring to share?” his fellow poets knew they needed to be present by sharing new work and paying close attention to the work of their fellow writers.

Frank is a proud Kentuckian who recognized our gifts even before we did. Along with the grand conjure woman, Nikky Finney (a visiting professor at UK at the time), he reached beyond his gauzy veil and midwifed the Affrilachian Poets. This word, Affrilachian, did not exist before. He named us: African and Appalachian. He knew who we were:

the word Affrilachia

was not intended to take lives

was not intended to destroy families

or divide communities

... it existed to make visible

to create a sense of place

that had not existed

for us

for any unwealthy common

people of color

now claiming the dirt

they were born in

—From “Sara Yevo” by Frank X Walker

Thanks to these Affrilachian gatherings, Nikky Finney birthed her classic, Rice (1995). I wrote my first collection, Tougaloo Blues (2003), and Frank wrote his first collection, Affrilachia (2000). Crystal Wilkinson conjured her first collection of short stories, Blackberries, Blackberries (2000), here, too.

If you were there in those sacred workshops he would say, “You are a writer.” He sees what you do when you are alone with words because he does it too. See this man with the third eye? See him sit back and let his eye work. See him claim you.

This essay is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.

Kelly Norman Ellis is the author of Tougaloo Blues (2003) and Offerings of Desire (2012). Her poetry has appeared in Sisterfire: Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry, Spirit and Flame, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Boomer Girls, Essence Magazine, Obsidian, Calyx, and Cornbread Nation. She is a recipient of a Kentucky Foundation for Women writer’...

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Author

Frank X Walker

Frank X Walker was born in Danville, Kentucky, and earned a BA from the University of Kentucky and an MFA from Spaulding University. He helped to found the Affrilachian Poets group and served as founding editor...

Glossary Terms

Affrilachian poets

Affrilachian is a word coined by the poet Frank X. Walker to describe African American people of regions in and near the Appalachian Mountains in North America. Walker founded the Affrilachian Poets Collective in 1991, whose members include poets and fiction writers such as Nikki Finney, Kelly Ellis, Paul Taylor, Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald Coleman, and Shana Smith among others. He coined the term to confront the assumed whiteness associated with the definition of the Appalachian region and its residents…

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1754205/they-seeded-themselves at Jan 31, 2026 at 7:29 AM EST.

Table of Contents

Poetry: January/February 2026

POEMS

Editor’s Note, January/February 2026

Proof

The Before Picture

Document

Sentences

The News

9

9

11

11

112

112

218

218

219

219

On Translating Ricardo Reis

Q&A

Kissing Cousins

Court-Ordered Group Therapy: Week 36

Good Chip

Expression

Whatever You Need

Vanishing Point

Kingdom

Salt Sky

“Jerry wants to argue about the existentialists again”

“Other women’s husbands are complete sentences.”

“Must have let out a now-I’ve-seen-it-all sigh when,”

“The marriage behaves, the business behaves, so what?”

“When I imitate myself, I am a number of certain people,”

telling my lover not to evacuate the fire i am fighting

This Must Be That Place

Routines

Wheat and Chaff Rhumba

Against Hope

The Leaving

Desert Hearts, 1985

skilled trade

I am not trying to be a man how [“my west-facing window”]

I am not trying to be a man how [“birdsong isn’t trying to be”]

My Hispanitude

We Play Paradise with Poppy Seeds

At Seventeen

From “blush”

Lynchian: a moving shadow

January Poem

Apologetic

Thrilling Conclusion

The Orchard

À Bout de Souffle

COMMENT

Destroying Time: On the Lasting Legacy of Larry Levis

FRANK X WALKER: KINFOLK

Beyond Black Appalachia

Affrilachia

Canning Memories

Mass Choir

Groom

One-Third of 180 Grams of Lead

Time Is Thinner than Glass

Thumb Wrestlers

Baptism by Dirt

Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben & Aunt Jemima

God’s House

Marking Twain

Death Rattle

How to Teach a Child to Pray

Drive

“They Seeded Themselves”