- Poems

- LINDA GREGG: NEVER GIVE UP LONGING

- COMMENT

Poems

- Editor’s Note, April 2026

- Mask of Khonsu

- Corn Mummy

- Scribes

- Grief Lessons

- A Room of Its Own

- Don’t Look Up

- Cicatrix

- Y.

- Y.

- L.

- L.

- I.

- I.

- K.

- K.

- O.

- O.

- S is for _____, with a Line from Keats

- Tangzhong, with a Line from Genet

- Gunderson

- smokes

- the patient line

- Orbit

- Ode on Humidity

- smudge

- والآن، تعالَ أيُّها الكِتاب

- Enter Book

- والآن، تعالَيْ يا ظِلالَ الأشجار

- Enter Shadows

- الآن، تعالَيْ أيَّتُها الدُّموع

- Enter Tears

- والآن، تعالَيْ أيَّتُها الجينات

- Enter Genetics

- On Translating Dalia Taha

- two ships

- What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

- The Pelicans Can No Longer Reach You

- My Albatross

- “There ain’t no preachers/b*tches in this park no more!”

- In Which the Rapture Misses Bushwick

- Innocence

- Gay Marriage

- The End of the Visit

ADRIAN MATEJKA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Editor’s Note, April 2026

Poetry moves differently from every other art.

By Adrian Matejka

Originally Published: April 1, 2026

Last May, my friend Youssef Daoudi published a graphic novel about the filmmaker Orson Welles called The Giant: Orson Welles, the Artist and the Shadow. One of the many things Daoudi’s fascinating work highlights is how difficult it can be for artists to grow when their first public offering is considered a classic. Welles went on to have a long career, but nothing he did was as well regarded as Citizen Kane. He’s not the only artist to experience this. Ralph Ellison never published a novel after Invisible Man and Harper Lee never wanted the follow-up to To Kill a Mockingbird in the world. Lauryn Hill and Jeff Buckley each only recorded one solo album. Vincent van Gogh only sold one painting to someone who wasn’t a relative while he was alive. There is a beautiful museum in Amsterdam dedicated to his art now, but during his lifetime, he was also a member of this list.

We don’t need to think of these masterful debuts as negative. I mean, who wouldn’t want that kind of success? These exceptional artists tantalized us with their talents and showed us that the point of art is possibility. The April issue you are holding is populated exclusively by poets making their first appearance in Poetry, and I want to be clear about the comparison I’m trying to make. There are no poets on my list of groundbreaking firsts as a nod to poetry’s construction. Poetry moves differently from every other art. Painters and musicians often find their voice through a single, sustained project: one canvas, one album, one performance that announces a new direction. Poetry, on the other hand, is an accumulation of drumbeats and heartfelt ideas. It takes writing hundreds of poems to locate your pitch, and then hundreds more before most of us have enough material to see what that pitch might actually do.

Except for Ann Z. Lombardi, whose gorgeous poem “Orbit” folds out next to Lo Naylor’s staggering “The Patient Line,” Poetry isn’t the first publication for the artists in these pages. This is simply our first opportunity to share their work with you. The masterful historical, ekphrastic poems by Matthew Shenoda that begin the issue are from his fourth collection of poems.  JoAnna Novak has written seven books of poetry and prose. Our folio on Linda Gregg, curated by David Semanki, highlights a poet whose entire life was lived through poetry. Gregg inspired generations of poets, but never appeared in the magazine while she was alive.

All the poets in this issue, and those in the issues of Poetry yet to come, discover their voices through habit and worry, astonishment and pleasure, with basic pencil-to-paper tenacity. We are lucky to receive the music and the revolution of their words. Like the first audience to watch the “no trespassing” sign and ominous brass that begins Citizen Kane, we know that we are witnessing the poetic future in these pages and others.

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/1779530/editors-note at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

MATTHEW SHENODA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Mask of Khonsu

By Matthew Shenoda

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

War & Conflict

Time & Brevity

Mythology & Folklore

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

Let those who seek my soul be dishonored and shamed.

—Psalm 35:4

Here you are, “on view”

the mask that was placed over your head,

your eternal breath,

misting the tamarisk and acacia.

You look at me, brother,

across the palindrome of time

bending the shackles of centuries

so we can each see the conquest fresh.

It was long before you

and long after me, still.

Our peace lost in times

of warring madness.

I try to block the wicked silhouette,

the doubled deception of reflective glass,

the border making light

of the too bright and blessed sun.

A quiet sight when you appear and hold my eyes in yours,

become ourselves again.

Wandering the banks unharmed,

unarmed with words of defense.

They stormed through you

and brought us down so low.

Where can we stand

where their shadow won’t climb over us?

The false light of these sterile halls

making specious your living face.

These are the irrepressible laws of conquer

affixed to our meeting.

I should have known you

in another way,

to share in that communion

unbroken by mediation.

But it is true,

that they have always known us

by what we believe,

misremember us despite our praise.

Three thousand years, and we remember

there is no end

to what has no beginning.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779580/mask-of-khonsu at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

MATTHEW SHENODA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Corn Mummy

By Matthew Shenoda

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

Race & Ethnicity

Living

Death

The Body

Mythology & Folklore

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

The linen wrapped to make a chevron

pointed toward earth

like an arrow that flies by day

to the gold-rooted foot

that makes the earth its dominion.

The blushed sky of arrival

frames the face of the fructuous one.

Your body filled with grain

and a sprouting

that resists pestilence.

Green of the interior

manifesting fire

in the lake of the mouth

held slake only by the

skin of your body.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779584/corn-mummy at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

MATTHEW SHENODA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Scribes

By Matthew Shenoda

Poem categories

Time & Brevity

Arts & Sciences

Poetry & Poets

Types/Modes

Ars Poetica

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Midwestern

From the Tomb of Meketre

Give a prayer or a word

an accounting of ink and thought

flour and need.

A map to the world behind the stone arch of pain

and eclipsing light.

Whatever the plea, it is a labor.

To fill the sacks and deliver them to their maker,

to take a tally of the haves and wants.

Some labors work to the aid of the whole,

make a window of their strain.

Some, a vein repetition,

a “diggers luck”

that polishes a mirror.

Whatever they have done and will do

I cannot make my sign

in any other way,

than the way

of those before me.

It’s ritual and breath

protection and emulation

practice for the then, now,

and what’s to come.

Time is a burst fruit,

evident

unable to be pieced together

in a way that keeps hands clean.

You know something of this mess

you who stitch together realm and circumstance

and expect your suture to hold.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779582/scribes at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

EMILY SKAJA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Grief Lessons

By Emily Skaja

Poem categories

Living

Death

Sorrow & Grieving

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Grief

No one stole your money.

No one stole your whole heart

then climbed into a stolen plane

and stole away into the night

to disappear entirely, stealing

darkness itself, then dawn.

What name would you even call

into the shadows between

here and gone, yours and no one’s,

what color could you give it,

this shade of something

slightly less than life?

Better to leave it whole.

Pure death—like an unmined diamond.

Keep the light of the fire

away from it—clean, untempered

by the tedious heat of language—

safe from your magpie, morbid way

of turning and turning

your pain in your hands

until you’ve crushed it to dust.

And anyway, who are you to say

I lost the world? No one. To admit

that you held the world at all?

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779588/grief-lessons at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

KATE COLBY | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Room of Its Own

By Kate Colby

Poem categories

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Arts & Sciences

Poetry & Poets

Poet categories

North America

U.S., New England

Sun butts into the great

American breakfast area—

malted vanilla waffle

maker, actual bananas.

Every morning I sell

off the world for parts,

by bedtime find a dented

fender on my threshold

(the blood on my door-

post’s only there to spare

itself). I need a clean

room, glinting forceps

to remove (is that flag

still up there ruining

the moon?). A big idea

is just waiting for me

to occur to—I keep it

in the safe behind this

frame whose impetus

is all it depicts.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779590/a-room-of-its-own at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

KATE COLBY | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Don’t Look Up

By Kate Colby

Poem categories

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Poet categories

North America

U.S., New England

The name of that lake,

the Russian one;

if the pig-hearted man

still lives. When my

pie chart of what

I need to know is

complete, scratch

on my plaque: she

was one in a hundred

percent circumference.

Some kids broke into

the mausoleum, threw

the bones around,

which is one way to

see a thing incomplete

with context. I was fine.

Seems old-fashioned,

even, now the cave

is hard to find behind

the wall of googly eyes.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779592/dont-look-up at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

KATE COLBY | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Cicatrix

By Kate Colby

Poem categories

Nature

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Poet categories

North America

U.S., New England

Reddish green is not

a color till summer’s

wick is lost to the wax

and I reap my pocks

of all things to fall from.

I live on a hill, hear

three churches’ bells

unsynced, so the toll

of an hour takes

a worthless amount

of time to fade.

Why is it math

is made of tens

when we live

in sets of twelve?

A moment’s when

you notice time

is seeing itself.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779594/cicatrix at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LUIS MUÑOZ | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Y.

By Luis Muñoz

Poem categories

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Gratitude

Ni esto ni lo otro.

Ni igual ni diferente.

Puesto que se había pasado

la noche

quitando los puntos

sobre las íes

y estaba nadando

en un mar tan picado

y resbaloso,

hecho solo de ellos

—que se excitaban

al coincidir—,

le aliviaba excluirse

de ser una certeza.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779600/y at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LUIS MUÑOZ | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Y.

By Luis Muñoz

Translated By Idra Novey & Garth Greenwell

Poem categories

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Gratitude

Translated from the Spanish

Not one thing or the other.

Not equal nor different.

Given that he had spent

the night

removing the dots

over his i’s

and was swimming

in a sea so choppy

and slippery,

made solely of those dots—

they were elated

to collide—

he was relieved to opt out

of being something certain.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779596/y at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LUIS MUÑOZ | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

L.

By Luis Muñoz

Poem categories

Nature

Landscapes & Pastorals

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Los higos están a punto. Algunos trozos muertos, diseminados después de un ataque de cotorras. El pañolón del viento es sedoso. La cabeza de gárgola del bote de jabón resplandece en el borde de la pila. Gotea la manguera medio enrollada en el suelo. “Estaría aquí con nosotros—dice—, le cosquillearía la ola de planes por hacer.”

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779604/l at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LUIS MUÑOZ | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

L.

By Luis Muñoz

Translated By Idra Novey & Garth Greenwell

Poem categories

Nature

Landscapes & Pastorals

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Translated from the Spanish

The figs are just ripe. A few dead scraps, scattered after an attack of parrots. The shawl of the wind is silken. The gargoyle head of the soap bottle gleams on the basin’s edge. The half-coiled garden hose drips on the ground. “If he were here with us,” she says, “it would tickle him, the breaking and rebreaking wave of plans left to be made.”

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779602/l at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LUIS MUÑOZ | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

I.

By Luis Muñoz

Poem categories

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Optimism

Miente si le preguntan

cómo hace.

Para saltar encima

o al lado.

Para eludir el sorteo

continuo.

Imperceptible,

en el patio de atrás

de su cabeza,

se abre una mata

suculenta de logro.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779606/i at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LUIS MUÑOZ | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

I.

By Luis Muñoz

Translated By Idra Novey & Garth Greenwell

Poem categories

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Optimism

Translated from the Spanish

He lies if they ask him

how he does it.

To leap on top

or to the side.

To dodge the ceaseless

lottery.

Imperceptible,

in the back patio

of his mind,

a plant opens,

a succulent

of accomplishment.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779608/i at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LUIS MUÑOZ | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

K.

By Luis Muñoz

Poem categories

Nature

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Activities

Gardening

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Joy & Contentment

Treinta segundos. El puro mediodía. Una mariposa monarca se posa en su hombro. Lleva una arrugada camiseta celeste de manga corta. Está al sol en el pequeño jardín, después de haber rastrillado las hojas secas que forman una giba bronce. En torno, un aire de anillos tibios y los vecinos pasean. No sabe por qué, con razones de sobra para estar preocupada, se siente a cubierto.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779610/k at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LUIS MUÑOZ | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

K.

By Luis Muñoz

Translated By Idra Novey & Garth Greenwell

Poem categories

Nature

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Activities

Gardening

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Joy & Contentment

Translated from the Spanish

Thirty seconds. Pure noon. A monarch butterfly shores on her shoulder. She wears a wrinkled shirt, sky blue and short-sleeved. She’s in the sun of the little garden, after raking the dry leaves into a bronze heap. Around her, an air of hazy rings and the neighbors pass by. She doesn’t know why, with more than enough reasons to worry, she feels safe.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779612/k at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LUIS MUÑOZ | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

O.

By Luis Muñoz

Poem categories

Nature

Stars, Planets, Heavens

Time & Brevity

El sol en el intento

de enroscarse

deja muescas semicirculares

en la pasta del cielo

y pequeños conjuntos

de intersecciones seguidas

como bocados.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779614/o at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LUIS MUÑOZ | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

O.

By Luis Muñoz

Translated By Idra Novey & Garth Greenwell

Poem categories

Nature

Stars, Planets, Heavens

Time & Brevity

Translated from the Spanish

The sun in its attempt

to screw itself in

leaves semicircular notches

in the dough of the sky,

tiny consecutive links

of intersections

like bitemarks.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779616/o at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

JOANNA NOVAK | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

S is for _____, with a Line from Keats

By JoAnna Novak

Poem categories

Love

Desire & Passion

Romantic Love

Activities

Eating & Drinking

Surely I must be in love

to make sabayon.

To unshelf Larousse

Gastronomique,

page to Z

for zabaglione,

reassure myself

marsala is customary,

to ask eggs

and brown sugar

to be enough.

Surely I want you

to eat arrantly

at your midnight

easel, oils,

my crumbs,

on your long

fingers. Surely

I am peaky,

beat for minutes,

requiring machine

power to achieve

such volume.

All to be folded

with cocoa

and salt,

piped—pleasure

never is at home.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

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JOANNA NOVAK | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Tangzhong, with a Line from Genet

By JoAnna Novak

Poem categories

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Activities

Eating & Drinking

For you, my exhaustion

is but a crumb. Gray

afternoon, tenebrous

train clattering copper

on the stove. Flour

and water, milk

and my beckoning

spoon. I did not

mean to be mean,

alliterative, or mis-

judge. Let me

draw trails

in this thickening,

just a smell

starts me—

slowly,

the yawning

burble, and I

exist, improved.

A man must dream

a long time

in order to act

with grandeur,

and dreaming

is nursed in

the darkness.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779622/tangzhong-with-a-line-from-genet at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

JOANNA NOVAK | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Gunderson

By JoAnna Novak

Poem categories

Relationships

Home Life

Activities

Eating & Drinking

In her mean-mouthed kitchen,

the crepes flipped perfect.

Butter-tender, brown-

freckled, thin as

pudding skin,

custardy, rolled

tight with jam

glittering garnet,

white storming

confectioner’s sugar,

slit with a side-

turned fork. I ate

while Jerry Taft explained

windchill, while she stood

at the stove, reading

readiness with a dull knife,

while I paged sales:

ALDI, D’Andrea’s,

Suburban Life.

When I ate,

I didn’t smile. That’s why

she liked me best.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779620/gunderson at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LO NAYLOR | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

smokes

By Lo Naylor

Poem categories

Living

Health & Illness

The Mind

Time & Brevity

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

After Mary Ruefle

I’m always up for a smoke, says my sister.

I, too, am always up for one, I say.

so we bundle ourselves in hats, scarves, coats.

at least we are outside, not in, says my sister,

& I say the same. the ice of January changes

to steam as we speak. the smoke

from the Lucky Strike burns in our throats.

breath & smoke. smoke & breath.

fire & mirror. cold & clear.

& as an hour passes, the clouds pink above us.

inside my head, she says, there is a sun

that never rises. & in my chest, I say,

a bell that rings without end.

what is seamlessly continuous except time

or nothing? then, out the door

an attendant pokes his head. time’s up, he says.

I nod & my sister snuffs out

her cigarette & disappears

into the ward from its high-walled courtyard.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779624/smokes at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

LO NAYLOR | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

the patient line

By Lo Naylor

Poem categories

Living

Health & Illness

The Body

The Mind

Types/Modes

Visual Poetry

Grief

Notes:

View a PDF of the poem.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1781604/the-patient-line at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

ANN Z. LOMBARDI | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Orbit

By Ann Z. Lombardi

Poem categories

Love

Living

Health & Illness

The Body

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

My girl’s got Turner’s, but she’s spinning just fine. Shows up on the scan like a small planet, wrapped in hazy weather. Light pooling beneath her skin, a halo around her like the milky way. A neutron star tucked at the base of her skull, dense and impossible to look away from. The tech says nothing, but I see her. See her glowing on the screen. “One X,” the docs say. Like it’s less. It’s not. She’s already making orbits in my body. They see fetal hydrops. I see constellations and celestial matter. They see thickened nuchal translucency. I see a nebula, a pillow of stardust cushioning her head. They say she won’t be. I say she already is. Cradled light. Tethered to me, bending my love toward her like gravity. My girl won’t stay. I know that. But while she’s here, she floats, she shines. She moves in me slow and strange and radiant. Caught in her pull, I am already rearranged.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1781895/orbit at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

P. SCOTT CUNNINGHAM | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Ode on Humidity

By P. Scott Cunningham

Poem categories

Nature

Weather

The Body

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Types/Modes

Ode

What am I if not what happens

when I try to run away?

Water falls out of me like

an opinion. I’m like a screen

door banging between two rivers.

Dear air, what’s inside me

you’re so desperate to take?

I put on the Atlantic like a sweater.

My head bobs on the surface

of a lake I’m named after.

Where do I belong?

My head asks. My body,

exasperated, answers.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779626/ode-on-humidity at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

IMOGEN SMITH | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

smudge

By imogen smith

Poem categories

Love

Desire & Passion

Living

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Movement flutters—

what predictability is not. Outside,

sunlight reigns ambiguous.

You can do that with your life.

Hope toward nothing

but continuance—flux

& reframe. Orbital,

the earth & moon. One

imagines a nucleus, tho

centers elude. For everything

an erotic surface. Today

i pick apple mint

along the roadside.

Despair rattles language

& later, after marking up

paper, after twisting stems

of calendula, i place

my feet in the pond. One day

smudges the next, each

renewed by darkness. Heart

beats break as doors open wide

unto elsewhere. A roundabout,

small town, heavy metropolis

choked in smoke, sky

orange, burning spruce,

lyric sullied,

a paucity of beds.

No future some can see.

Yet witness, in friendship,

the unruliness of

entanglement. Who pays

upon arrival, who child

of extraction, who’ll loosen,

let love hasten?

It’s beguiling—

truths obvious

the truth, incalculable.

i write to stay living,

read & walk for similar reasons,

yearn for uncontainables

—moonlight

beyond creek slope,

traffic & slow sex,

water softening wood.

The smudge outlasts us.

We tongue & teethe what’s holy

& cannot be spelt.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779628/smudge at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

DALIA TAHA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

والآن، تعالَ أيُّها الكِتاب

By Dalia Taha

Poem categories

Arts & Sciences

Reading & Books

الكتابُ الذي كانَ بِيَدِكَ

يجلِسُ الآنَ على الكومُدينَةِ قُربَ سَريرِك.

بِقَلبِهِ الخُطوطُ التي رسَمتَها أسفلَ الجُمَلِ التي هزَّتكَ، تلكَ التي

قرأتَها أكثرَ مِن مرَّةٍ وأنتَ مأخوذ. تلكَ التي وضَعْتَ الكتابَ

على جَنْبِ فوْراً بَعدَها

وأخذْتَ تتمشّى بينَ الغُرَفِ دونَ هَدَف.

لقد غَرِقتَ لأُسبوعٍ كاملٍ

في هذا الكتاب، حَملتَهُ معَكَ إلى كُلِّ مكانٍ

وقرأتَهُ في سَريرِكَ وأنتَ وَحْدَكَ

ومُمَدَّداً على الكَنَبةِ بينَما أصواتُ العائلَةِ

،تأتيكَ من غُرفةٍ أُخرى. وكلَّما رفعتَ رأسَكَ، وجدتَ نفسَكَ تُقابلُ العالَم

أمامَ نافِذَتِكَ، مُحَملِقاً بالسَّماء. مُستَعِدّاً، وأخيراً، أن تُحاوِرَ التِّلال.

كُلُّ كتابٍ يمنحُكَ لُغةً لِتُحاوِرَ شيئاً في هذا العالَم

لم تكُِن تُدركَُ أنَهُِ موجود: مَسامَُ الشَّجرِةٍ، أُنوف ُ الثَعالِب، الحُزَّن ُ في الوُجوه, معاناة شعبٍ.

أنظُرُ إليكَ، كَم تبدو جَميلاً وأنتَ تَقرأ.

أنظُرُ إليك، كَم تَبدو وديعاً وأنتَ تدَعُ قارَّةً كاملةً

تحتَلُّكَ، وأنتَ تضعُ الكتابَ على جَنْب، على الكومُدينَة،

كما لو أنَّكَ تُعيدُ للعالَمِ شيئاً، يخُصُّهُ.

واقِفاً بِذُهولٍ أمامَ التِّلال، كما لَو أنَّ

الكتاب، أيضاً، يُعيدُ للعالَمِ شَيئاً يخُصُّه.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779634/oalan-taaala-ayuwha-alkitab at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

DALIA TAHA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Enter Book

By Dalia Taha

Translated By Sara Elkamel

Poem categories

Arts & Sciences

Reading & Books

Translated from the Arabic

The book you held in your hands

now lies on the nightstand by your bed, in its heart

the lines you sketched

under the sentences you read more than once, bewildered,

before you put the book down

and started pacing aimlessly between the rooms.

You let it drown you for a full week,

took it everywhere you went;

you read it alone in bed,

and stretched out on the sofa while the family’s voices

drifted toward you from the other room.

Whenever you’d lift your head,

you found yourself

face-to-face with the world,

glancing at the sky outside your window;

ready, at last, to converse with the hills.

Every book grants you the language

you need to make contact

with something you had no idea even existed:

a tree’s pores, a fox’s nose,

sadness on a face, a nation’s suffering.

Look how beautiful you look as you read.

Look how peaceful you look

as you let an entire continent colonize you;

as you lay the book down on the nightstand,

as if returning to the world

something that belongs to it—

as you stand, dazzled by the hills

as though the book, too,

has returned to the world

something that belongs to it.

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Sara Elkamel.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779630/enter-book at May 7, 2026 at 7:48 PM EDT.

DALIA TAHA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

والآن، تعالَيْ يا ظِلالَ الأشجار

By Dalia Taha

Poem categories

Nature

Trees & Flowers

Social Commentaries

Cities & Urban Life

History & Politics

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

ثُم رأيتُ ظِلَّ السَّروةِ الضَّخمةِ

كانَ طويلاً، يقطعُ مَصَفَّ السَّيّاراتِ

إلى نِصفَين

كيفَ يُمكِنُ أن تكونَ الحارةُ صغيرةً

كَرامَ الله التَّحتا؟

ويكونُ ظِلُّ شجَرةٍ فيها عِملاقاً كالحُدودِ بينَ الدُّوَل؟

كيفَ يُمْكنُ أنْ تجِدَ في شارعٍ

الليْلَ والنَّهارَ نائمَينِ جَنْبَ بَعضِهِمَا البَعضَ

مِثلَ زَوْجَينِ؟

كيفَ يُمكِنُ أن يتزاحمَ هنا

الشِّعرُ والبشَر؟

في الظُّهرِ سيكونُ ظِلُّ السَّروةِ قد قَصُر

وصارَ طِفلةً تُمسِكُ بيدِها

وبينَ المدُنِ ستمتلِئُ الشوارعُ بسيّاراتِنا بِنُمَرِها الصَّفراءِ والبَيضاء

عائدينَ من أشغالِنا

وستكونُ المَركَباتُ على الحواجزِ على مَدى النَّظَر

والطُّلابُ عالقينَ في “الفوردات” بين الطُّرُقِ الالتفافيَّة

بينَما الأشجارُ سبَقَتْنا إلى المعرِفة،

تستقبلُ الرّيحَ الغَريبةَ بأذرُعِها

وتصنعُ حُدوداً

ثم تَتَراجعُ عنها.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779638/oalan-taaalay-ya-thilala-alashgar at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

DALIA TAHA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Enter Shadows

By Dalia Taha

Translated By Sara Elkamel

Poem categories

Nature

Trees & Flowers

Social Commentaries

Cities & Urban Life

History & Politics

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Translated from the Arabic

Then I saw the shadow

of the massive cypress tree

split the queue of cars in two.

How can a neighborhood be as narrow

as Ramallah al-Tahta?

How can one tree’s shadow

be as vast as a border cleaving countries?

How can night and day lie together on one street

like husband and wife—

how can poems and people

share one sheet?

By this afternoon, the cypress tree’s shadow

will have shrunk into a little girl

holding out her hand.

Driving home from work,

our white and yellow plates

will clog the streets; at the checkpoints,

cars will stretch far into the distance;

and on the bypass roads,

orange buses will sit heavy with students.

The trees have always known better—

they let strange winds rush into their arms;

they cast borders

and then they reverse them.

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Sara Elkamel.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779636/enter-shadows at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

DALIA TAHA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

الآن، تعالَيْ أيَّتُها الدُّموع

By Dalia Taha

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

War & Conflict

History & Politics

Arts & Sciences

Reading & Books

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Grief

في مَعرَضِ الكُتبِ هناكَ كتابٌ واحدٌ باسمِكِ، “تاريخُ الدُّموع”. يقبَعُ بينَ كُتبِ السِّياسيّينَ وعُلماءِ الاجتماعِ  وتاريخِ المَعاركِ والحُروب. ولكنْ في مكانٍ ما هُنالِكَ مكتبةٌ كامِلةٌ لكِ. فلِكُلِّ كِتابٍ عن معركة، كتابٌ آخَرُ غيرُ موجودٍ عن دُموعِها. أُريدُ أن أتمَشّى في هذا المَعرَض. صحيحٌ أنَّني لن أستطيعَ أن أُمسِكَ أيَّ كتابٍ في يَدي، صحيحٌ أنَّني لا أستطيعُ أن أُقَلِّبَ الصَّفْحاتِ، ولا حتّى أن أقرأَ عناوينَ الكُتبِ وأسماءَ كُتّابِها، فهُم اختَفَوْا أيضاً مِن التّاريخ، مثلَ دُموعِهِم.

فنحنُ نعرفُ ما يحصُل، ما إن تبدأَ حَربٌ على شعبٍ حتى تقتلِعَ كُلَّ شيء: لُغتَهم، بيوتَهم، أغانيهم، شَجَراتِهم، والدُّموعَ من حَدَقاتِهم، وتترُكَهُم على الشَّواطئِ أمامَ سُفُنِ تجارةِ العَبيدِ مُجرَّدَ صناديقِ شَحْن.

ولهذا أُريدُ مَعرَضَ الكُتبِ ذلك، بِرُوّادِهِ القليلينَ وبِرَكِ دُموعِهِ وحديقتِهِ المَهجورةِ وصَمتِهِ الحَديدِيّ. وأُريدُ أن أكونَ بينَ كُتُبهِ التي تتراكَمُ على رُفوفِهِ وتكسِرُها، حينَ أقرأُ في صباحٍ بِ كَهرباءَ جُملةً مثلَ”صباحاً، عامَ 1650 ، سِتُّ سُفنٍ لتجارةِ العبيدِ تَقِفُ عندَ مَصَبِّ نَهرِ الكونغو في المُحيطِ بانتِظارِ حُمولَتِهِنَّ“.

أيَّتُها الدُّموع، يستأصِلُكِ التاريخُ مِن الجريمةِ كما ينزِعُ الخريفُ الأوراقَ عن الشَّجرة، حتى آخِرُ ورقةٍ لا يتركُها للشَّجرَة، حتى آخِرُ دَمعةٍ لا يتركُها لِشَعبِها. ولا أعرِفُ، حقّاً لا أعرِفُ، أيُّهُما أسوأُ جريمةً، أن تُقلَعَ الناسُ من أرضِها، أم الدُّموعُ من حدَقاتِها؟!

ولا أعرفُ، لا أعرفُ، كيف يُحاولُ أحدٌ أن يوقِفَ الجريمةَ بأن يُعيدَ الدُّموعَ إلى أصحابِها. العدالةُ لَيسَت أنْ نَرسِمَ الدُّموعَ على صناديقِ الشَّحن. العدالةُ أن تُغرِقَ صناديقُ الشَّحنِ السفينةَ، أن تَكسِرَ الدموعُ رُفوفَ المكتبات.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779642/alan-taaalay-ayawtuha-alduwmoaa at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

DALIA TAHA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Enter Tears

By Dalia Taha

Translated By Sara Elkamel

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

War & Conflict

History & Politics

Arts & Sciences

Reading & Books

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Grief

Translated from the Arabic

At the book fair, The History of Tears is the only book that mentions you. Around it are piles of manuscripts by historians of war and conflict. But somewhere, there must be soaring stacks in your name; for every book about a battle, there is a missing book about its tears. That’s the book fair I would prefer to walk through. It’s true I will not be able to hold any of the volumes in my hands, flip through their pages, read their titles or the names of their authors—they too have been wiped from history.

We all know what happens in war. As soon as it begins, it strips a people of everything: their language, their homes, their songs, their trees—it even yanks the tears right out of their ducts—and leaves nothing on beaches but human cargo outside slave ships.

That’s why I want that book fair, with its scant attendance, its abandoned garden, its ironclad silence. I want to join the books that rack up on the shelves until they crumble. I want to rush there right after I read, on a morning without power: “Morning. Year 1650. Where the Congo River gushes out into the ocean, six slave trading ships await their cargo.”

Tears: history excises you from its crimes the same way autumn rids branches of their leaves; even the last leaf it does not cede to the tree—even the last tear it does not leave to its people. And I don’t know, I really don’t know, which crime is worse: to uproot families from their land, or tears from their corneas?

And I don’t know how returning tears to their owners could possibly reverse the crime. Justice is not the drawing of tears on cargo boxes. Justice is cargo sinking the ship; tears crushing the bookshelves.

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Sara Elkamel.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779640/enter-tears at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

DALIA TAHA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

والآن، تعالَيْ أيَّتُها الجينات

By Dalia Taha

Poem categories

Living

The Body

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Arts & Sciences

Sciences

لقد أخذَ العالَمُ مِئةً وسَبعَةً وتسعينَ ألفَ عامٍ

حَتّى يُنجِبَني.

تَشَكَّلَ حِمضِي النَّوَوِيُّ بَبُطءٍ عَبْرَ القُرون،

مثل طَبخَةٍ على نارٍ هادِئَة.

وفي كُلِّ تلكَ الأزْمِنَة

كانت أجزاءٌ مِنّي دائماً موجودةً.

سبَقَني إلى العالَمِ أنْفي،

أو يَداي. غضَبي السَّريعُ أو خصلات شعري.

سبَقَني إلى العالَمِ النَّهَمُ للشِّعرِ والكُتُبِ والمَلَلُ بِسُرعَة،

وصُعوبَةُ الوُقوعِ في الحُبّ.

ولا بُدَّ أنَّ هناكَ مَن مَشَتْ بهِ مِن قَبلي:

عَقلي الغَريب.

ثُّم وصَلتُ مِنَ الأبديَّةِ

إلى عالَمِ الأسئِلَة: أحملُ وَعيي بِيَدٍ وخَوفي بِيَدٍ.

على عُنُقي سِلسِلَتي الجينيّةُ

بداخِلِها كُلُّ أسلافي.

تُرى في أيِّ جسَدٍ عِشتُ أكبَرَ فَرَح؟

في أيِّ جسَدٍ سبَحْتُ بينَ الأمواج؟

تُرى في أيِّ حياةٍ كنتُ مُقاتِلَة؟

أو عاشِقةً تكسِرُ قُلوبَ الرِّجال؟

لقد كُنتُ موجودةً دائماً،

دونَ أن أُفكِّرَ، دونَ أن أشُكَّ.

أمّا الآن- أملِكُ عَظْماً

ولَحْماً. وأعيُناً بُنِّيَّةً،

وأتعذَّبُ تحتَ سَماءِ الوَعيِ والنُّجوم.

وأُمضي الوقتَ في الأسئِلَةِ

حتّى أشعُرَ بأنَّني في صُحبَةِ أحَدٍ في الطَّريق.

ولن أترُكُ في هذا العالَمِ ذرّيَّتي

ولكنني مثل المُتَنَبي، سأترُكُ أبياتًا وجُملاً واسئلةً

تُرافقُ البشريَّةَ للأبَدِ

مثل سِلاسِلهمُ الجِينيَّة.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779644/oalan-taaalay-ayawtuha-algynat at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

DALIA TAHA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Enter Genetics

By Dalia Taha

Translated By Sara Elkamel

Poem categories

Living

The Body

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Arts & Sciences

Sciences

Translated from the Arabic

It took the world 197,000 years to make me.

My dna formed leisurely across centuries,

like a slow-cooked meal.

My nose preceded me into the world,

as did my hands, my short temper,

the locks of my hair, my thirst

for poetry and books, how quickly

I grow bored, and my struggle

to fall in love. My peculiar mind

must have inhabited another woman’s body

before I came around. I have sailed from eternity

to the world of questions: my consciousness

in one hand, and my fear in another.

Two chains around my neck

house all my ancestors.

I wonder which of all my bodies

experienced the greatest joy?

Which body swam

in the company of waves?

When was I a fighter? Or a lover

annihilating men’s hearts?

In this body, I possess bones,

flesh, brown eyes, and I suffer

beneath the skies

of consciousness and stars.

I spend all my time asking questions

if only to imagine a companion along the road.

And I will not bequeath my progeny

to this world, but, like Al-Mutanabbi,

I will hand down verses, lines,

and questions to accompany humanity

into every future,

like genetic chains.

Notes:

Read the translator's note by Sara Elkamel.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779646/enter-genetics at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

SARA ELKAMEL | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Translating Dalia Taha

Taha asks us to attend to what language itself crumbles before.

By Sara Elkamel

Originally Published: April 1, 2026

The four poems published in Poetry come from Dalia Taha’s Enter World, first published in Arabic by Almutawassit in 2025, and forthcoming from Graywolf in my English translation in 2026. Organized as a series of summons, each poem in the book begins with the word “Enter,” inviting silence, grass, books, demolished homes, hills, and other natural, unnatural, and emotional landscapes to inhabit the world the book creates. In every poem making up this collection, Taha challenges us to reimagine, reinstate, or rethink our relationships to history, to compromised states of being and embodied experiences, to the places and natural forms that surround us, and to language itself.

“I wrote this collection partly so I would not go mad, and partly so one can hold onto whatever has not been contaminated completely by this war,” she said in one of our earliest conversations. Taha lives and writes in the occupied West Bank, in Ramallah—where a two-year genocide unfolded approximately fifty miles away in Gaza, just beyond reach. Writing, for Taha, becomes a way of preserving sanity—a refusal of the idea that war is an inescapable contaminant of the marrow and matter of life.

“We all know what happens in war,” Dalia writes in the prose poem Enter Tears. “It strips a people of everything: their language, their homes, their songs, their trees—it even yanks the tears right out of their ducts.” Enraged by the excision, from the accounts of atrocities and war crimes, of the salty fluid sorrow calls home, the speaker proceeds to argue for an impossible archive: she wants a book fair populated only by anthologies of tears.

In the same vein, the poems that make up Enter World work by summoning what might have been erased, alongside what remains—fragile, maybe, but not obliterated—into the space of the poem: a book resting on a nightstand, a cypress tree’s shadow splitting a street in half, ancestral knowledge carried in the body, tears excised from history. As she surrounds herself, and us, with the beauty and cruelty of life, Taha asks us to attend to what language itself crumbles before.

Sara Elkamel (she/her) is a poet and journalist living between her hometown, Cairo, Egypt, and New York City. She earned an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Elkamel's poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, The Common, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Yale Review, the Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry London, Poet Lore, Best New Poets ...

Read Full Biography

Previous In Issue Next In Issue

Poem

From the magazine:Enter Book

By Dalia Taha

Translated By Sara Elkamel

The book you held in your hands

now lies on the nightstand by your bed, in its heart

the lines you sketched…

Poem

From the magazine:والآن، تعالَ أيُّها الكِتاب

By Dalia Taha

الكتابُ الذي كانَ بِيَدِكَ

يجلِسُ الآنَ على الكومُدينَةِ قُربَ سَريرِك.

بِقَلبِهِ الخُطوطُ التي رسَمتَ…

Poem

From the magazine:Enter Shadows

By Dalia Taha

Translated By Sara Elkamel

Then I saw the shadow

of the massive cypress tree

split the queue of cars in two.

How can a neighborhood…

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1782150/on-translating-dalia-taha at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

ERALDO SOUZA DOS SANTOS, NILVA MOREIRA DE SOUZA | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

two ships

By Eraldo Souza dos Santos & Nilva Moreira de Souza

Poem categories

Social Commentaries

War & Conflict

History & Politics

Living

Sorrow & Grieving

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

Grief

a four-hand poem

the, the dead, the dead slave, the dead slave’s body, the dead slave’s body is, the dead slave’s body is thrown, the dead slave’s body is thrown overboard, the dead slave’s body is thrown overboard from, the dead slave’s body is thrown overboard from the, the dead slave’s body is thrown overboard from the ship, the dead slave’s body is thrown overboard from the ship and, the enslaved body is thrown overboard from the ship and the waves, the enslaved is thrown overboard from the ship and the waves wash, her body is thrown overboard from the ship and the waves wash it, my mother is thrown overboard from the ship and the waves wash her ashore. she, she rises, she rises and, she rises and swims, she rises and swims slowly, she rises and swims slowly in, she rises and swims slowly in the, she rises and swims slowly in the wake, she rises and swims slowly in the wake of, she rises and swims slowly in the wake of what, she rises and swims slowly in the wake of what has, she rises and swims slowly in the wake of what has no, she breathes like the waves, she rises and rises slowly in the wake of what has no name.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779654/two-ships at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

ERALDO SOUZA DOS SANTOS | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

By Eraldo Souza dos Santos

Poem categories

Nature

Seas, Rivers, & Streams

Social Commentaries

Living

Sorrow & Grieving

Grief

Melancholy & Despair

We who drank all the water

and now have nothing left to drink.

We who drank all the water

and now have nowhere left to sail.

We miss you.

We who now walk under

the scorching sun among shipwrecks.

We who now finally feel

the smell of your rotting body.

We bury you.

We who will soon die

because we have been so thirsty.

We whose tears can fill

rivers seas oceans.

We sail.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779650/what-the-world-will-look-like-when-all-the-water-leaves-us at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

GOLDEN | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Pelicans Can No Longer Reach You

By Golden

Poem categories

Nature

Social Commentaries

Melancholy & Despair

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Mid-Atlantic

The pelicans can no longer reach you

Watching droughts from windows

Arctic snow shining shingles

Fire cutting houses into koi ponds

Humans pray in their language

Pillaging, pills, & purgatory

Refuse stretching for prognoses

Digging cranes into ecosystems

Never thank or leave the bones

Blue whales sacked for winter sludge

Breached death to signal the angels

Cancer now set in our capturing

Mortals ignore Earth for disaster

A mother saves its kingdom.

I made it home, 2025, Roslindale, Massachusetts, by Golden.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779656/the-pelicans-can-no-longer-reach-you at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

GOLDEN | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

My Albatross

By Golden

Poem categories

Love

Nature

Relationships

Loneliness

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Mid-Atlantic

On the mountain coast,

Grass & arctic wings.

You clicked in my ear.

A three-meter hug.

A bobble of gay song

& battle grass. You fell

Like a lily. Timid

We would never match.

Fifty years is a life-

Time I’d ask for again.

Just to see you bow,

Our anchor on the prairie

Lands. Remembering the ice,

How you licked our lonely away.

Holding you makes me feel infinite, 2025, MacDowell, Peterborough, New Hampshire, by Golden.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779658/my-albatross at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

DEESOUL CARSON | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“There ain’t no preachers/b*tches in this park no more!”

By DeeSoul Carson

Poem categories

Love

Desire & Passion

Religion

Relationships

LGBTQ+

yells the man walking through the park, though the man

I’ve just met while cruising & I can’t decide which group

he is actually screaming about, the plosives striking the snails

of our inner eardrums discordantly. We agree both answers

are simultaneously true when the man follows up with a “hallelujah!”

as he rummages through the park’s bins for plastics.

He’s so right, of course; there’s so little of God in this park,

so little of the shame I have carried most of my youth,

just a nigga on his knees with a dick in his mouth while another

stays wary of strangers stumbling through the night’s taut silence.

Grandson of a preacher, so often I know better,

but tonight I don’t want to care. A man looks at me with wanting

and I’m god enough to grant it. Forgive me, Lord,

I know what I’ve done. We can talk about it later.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779662/there-aint-no-preachers-b-tches-in-this-park-no-more at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

DEESOUL CARSON | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

In Which the Rapture Misses Bushwick

By DeeSoul Carson

Poem categories

Religion

Faith & Doubt

Relationships

Family & Ancestors

Types/Modes

Prose Poem

It is on this random Friday my mother texts me—yes, texts me, though I did not know it was her at first because she is on her sixth Obama Phone this year—to ask me—yes, me—if the rapture is happening and I pause to look out my window because the question is so ridiculous and because I am in the middle of Bushwick where, had the rapture happened and I hadn’t known it, I still wouldn’t know, because what God-fearing person moves to Bushwick, which my mother must have known because she follows up on her first text with obviously you’re okay, but I saw it on the news, which then prompts me to tell my mother—prone to conspiracy—that the rapture is not, in fact, happening and you should really evaluate your sources and that if the rapture were happening, I’d be on the first bus to Glory, thank you very much, to which my mother—prone to skepticism—asks when the last time I prayed was, at which point I, knowing I had been stumped, ignore the question and instead opt to ask my mother about changing my name legally, at which she—prone to distraction—tells the long story of my birth, of who I did and didn’t belong to and who did or didn’t or wasn’t supposed to know, how I was so small I could fit in the palm of her palm, how the helicopter carried us to another hospital, how even still in my puny state she called me diesel—after her favorite Autobot, Optimus Prime—how yes, yes, of course the name is mine to change, my life is mine to live, yes, yes, while I am still unraptured and unclaimed by God, go, go, be what she never could have dreamed, alive past the hour of my birth and onward to oblivion.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779660/in-which-the-rapture-misses-bushwick at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

DAVID WOO | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Innocence

By David Woo

Poem categories

Love

Romantic Love

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Arts & Sciences

Painting & Sculpture

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

Didion said that it ends when you’re stripped

of the delusion

that you like yourself.

People burned themselves into my eyes

with their beauty and intelligence.

I chose not to see them.

The Quad opened onto a vast data center

in the Bypath Meadow.

Seductive accountants murmured,

“We love you. Now you must pay.”

The attic in which I gathered the sordid sheets

of my artistic misprisions—

the botched self-portrait, the miniaturized epic—

became a womblike garret

at the Museum of Lost Bohemias.

My mother stood flickering on a porch,

waving farewell, her silent film

decayed beyond preservation.

I was walking to Hart Crane’s resting place

when I encountered a famed neurosurgeon,

who held up finely tapered fingers,

insured for millions,

and made a tiny incision on the air.

Tell me how I fell into your lap

and didn’t break you.

Tell me how we found this mouse hole

where we nibble crumbs and curl to sleep

whisker to tail.

Tell me how you can love a mouse

who took a hundred lifetimes

to impersonate a poet.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779664/innocence at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

DAVID WOO | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Gay Marriage

By David Woo

Poem categories

Love

Romantic Love

Living

Marriage & Companionship

Relationships

LGBTQ+

Joy & Contentment

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

Now that I’m happy, I think of when I was not.

The angles of the city gave the impression of happiness,

the torquing El, the tourist sculpture

like a globe shimmying through a looking-glass sock.

Late one night, from his illumined image on a grid,

the stranger in the high-rise summoned me

for an act so angular I became the neck

of the crepuscular swan that Cornell glued into a box.

The next day I stood in front of the vitrine

at the museum, willing away my own reflection

to inhabit a clock, a dovecote,

a bubble that would never pop.

Across the country I’d idly refresh his screens,

the young doctor in dignified poses

at the pediatric oncology ward

or alluring ones above Michigan Avenue,

at first alone, then with another, grinning

like reunited twins, until their journey

mirrored our own updates: a sensuous ryokan,

a waterfall guttering in an antipodal fjord,

matching tuxedos in a canted archway

at some timeless villa rustica.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779666/gay-marriage at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

DAVID WOO | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The End of the Visit

By David Woo

Poem categories

Love

Heartache & Loss

Nature

Landscapes & Pastorals

Living

Death

Health & Illness

Grief

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

On my last day, we came back after a late lunch, the stone pavers

of the promenade cutting a straight line between rows

of midcentury glass condos, until a misjudged wall blocked the vista

above the sea, unless you knew to enter the unassuming stairwell

to the left, as you did, pressing your hand into my back

as we rose to that spot you had shown me years before:

the breakers beyond the wall, the cliff formations on either side,

the sea folded into a Fibonacci shell of green scarab and lapis lazuli,

the sun descending to its midsummer curtain of centered fire.

It was there you told me the news—and the waves fell away,

and a panel of scabbed concrete rose in their place, partly rendered

in gray spray paint over red graffito and black graffito,

a languid palimpsest whose translation into human meaning

I would never complete. I had crumpled to the steps,

and the world had bleared, and you granted me a reckoning

with what others would learn a year later, after you’d gone,

and then you raised me up to look at the sea again, sunset now,

and nothing  jeweled, just a stanched bleeding of revenant light,

but I understood, and leaned against you, and knew the wisdom

of the beetling waves and the lucid way you stood dry-eyed

beside me in my tears, motioning to something falling from the sky.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779668/the-end-of-the-visit at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG: NEVER GIVE UP LONGING

- A Poet of Magnitude and Intimacy: On Linda Gregg

- Untitled [“When I was eleven”]

- We Manage Most When We Manage Small

- Too Bright to See

- Marriage and Midsummer’s Night

- Praising Spring

- Persephone to the Other Husband

- Grinding the Lens

- The War

- Asking for Directions

- Let Birds

- As Being Is Eternal

- Staying After

- After the Fires

- The Singers Change, the Music Goes On

- Arriving

- She Sang of Seeing

DAVID SEMANKI | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

A Poet of Magnitude and Intimacy: On Linda Gregg

Gregg lived as she wrote, winnowing down life to bare essentials, which, in turn, made space for the visionary to reveal itself.

By David Semanki

Originally Published: April 1, 2026

Linda Gregg, circa 1999. Photograph by Hal Lum. Courtesy of Graywolf Press.

Linda Gregg and her poetry were one. Poetry seemed to emanate from her, to surround her like an aura. I observed this firsthand. She was my teacher, initially at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center, and, shortly afterward, at Columbia University’s graduate creative writing program. Both inside and outside the classroom, Gregg was a thrilling mentor. She did not just ponder the technical aspects of a poem—she would explore with a student if the complex depths of a poem had been reached, or if the poet could go further. Sometimes she would tell her students to take their poem, turn it over, and, without looking at what they had written previously, write the poem (again). They contained the poem, she felt, and the pure poem would surface.

Over the years, as our friendship grew, Gregg conveyed in countless conversations the beliefs that she held as a writer. One idea Gregg kept front and center was that, as she stated in an unpublished essay, “my life and my poetry are married together. My poetry is lived. From the very beginning, language for me was about something seen, something believable.”

Born as a twin on September 9, 1942, and with two older sisters, Gregg’s childhood and its Edenic northern California landscape reverberated throughout her work. Despite her love of learning, schoolwork was a challenge
for her. Elements related to language skills (such as spelling, punctuation, and the pace/fluency of reading) were a source of anxiety. (Dyslexia also ran in her immediate family.) Gregg persevered and enrolled in college at San Francisco State in the early sixties, where she studied with the seminal poet Robert Duncan and with Jack Gilbert, who had just won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Views of Jeopardy (1962). In Gilbert, she found someone, in regards to her poetry, whom she trusted and respected. The two poets were different in the way they approached writing, yet they complemented each other. Gregg’s poetry had an ineffable quality, a magic in it, Gilbert felt. Gregg found Gilbert’s way of working derived from his profound intellect. The two remained lifelong friends and continued a conversation about poetry for the next half a century.

When she received her undergraduate degree in 1967, San Francisco—along with much of America—was going through tumult and growing pains. Gregg and Gilbert chose to head to Europe to concentrate on contemplative living and writing. (Although never legally married, she and Gilbert referred to their relationship, on occasion, as a marriage.) With little money, the pair settled into a Spartan existence for stretches of time on Greek islands. Of those days, Gregg would recall making lentil and barley stew to last for the week. During this approximate five-year odyssey, she carried only two books—The Oxford Book of English Verse and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos. On why Greece was chosen, Gregg offered, “There are gods in that earth ... It was possible in Greece to get very close to the actuality of the physical world ... get close to being what alive is.”

After separating from Gilbert, Gregg returned to San Francisco in the early seventies to live alone on Potrero Hill and attend graduate school at San Francisco State. She completed a creative thesis of poems, Part by Part, in May 1972 and received a Masters of Arts degree in 1975. Many of the thesis poems had been composed during her time in Greece, where Gregg had honed her poetic voice and tightened her writing style. Gregg developed a rigorous writing routine while she and Gilbert lived abroad, one that she would keep up for most of her later writing life: Gregg would work on poems seven days a week from morning until three in the afternoon, with only a small break for lunch. Poetry was always a true vocation, she deemed, and not a profession to secure financial gain.

Starting in the mid-seventies, Gregg’s poems began appearing in national periodicals. The New Yorker accepted several. Antaeus, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares also welcomed her work. With her career building momentum, Scott Walker, cofounder of Graywolf Press, acquired Gregg’s first collection, Too Bright to See (1981). Over the course of her life, Gregg published seven books, including a new and selected volume, where readers can encounter her poetic voice—a near-match to her actual speech in its patterns and delivery, observations and gravity. “I use ... both abstract statement and image,” she noted, “and it’s important to remember that a statement can have a wildness that’s as good as an image.” Gregg’s supreme commitment to poetry leaves a legacy for others to follow. A path where the majesty of the natural world has its counterpoint in a respect for common objects and daily tasks, where careful observation can lead to unexpected inspiration, and where poetry deepens and enriches one’s lived life. She passed away on March 20, 2019, in Manhattan.

Hers is a poetry of magnitude and intimacy. Revelations attained from a lifetime of pursuing, along with poetry, her trinity of touchstones—the sacred, romantic love, and nature. Gregg lived as she wrote, winnowing down life to bare essentials, which, in turn, made space for the visionary to reveal itself. Linda Gregg’s poetry is unflinching, luminous, and essential. As she wrote earnestly in her essay “The Art of Finding,”

I believe that poetry at its best is found rather than written. Traditionally, and for many people even today, poems have been admired chiefly for their craftsmanship and musicality, the handsomeness of language and the abundance of similes, along with the patterning and rhymes. I respect and enjoy all that, but I would not have worked so hard and so long at my poetry if it were primarily the production of well-made objects, just as I would not have sacrificed so much for love if love were mostly about pleasure.

1/6

Linda Gregg during one of her stays in Greece. Courtesy of Louise Gregg.

2/6

Linda Gregg, circa 1999. Photograph by Hal Lum. Courtesy of Graywolf Press.

3/6

Artwork by Linda Gregg created on the Greek island of Thira (commonly known as Santorini) from October 7, 1970. (Monolithos is a village and a volcanic sand beach on the east coast of the island.) Courtesy of Louise Gregg.

4/6

Artwork by Linda Gregg of olive trees in Greece. Courtesy of Louise Gregg.

5/6

Valentine’s Day card made by Linda Gregg for Jack Gilbert. Valentine’s Day was Gregg’s favorite holiday. Courtesy of Louise Gregg.

6/6

Stew Recipe from Linda Gregg Papers. Courtesy of David Semanki.

This essay is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki. Most of the quotes from Gregg in this introduction come from “Linda Gregg: An Interview” by David Wojahn, Poets & Writers, November/December 1991. One quote is from Linda Gregg’s unpublished essay “About Love Poems That Are Love as a Mountain,” found in Gregg’s papers at Emory University. The final quote is from Gregg’s “The Art of Finding,” which first appeared in American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Spring 2001.

The editors would like to thank David Semanki for his work compiling this folio and Louise Gregg for providing additional biographical information about her sister for Semanki’s introduction.

Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

David Semanki is the literary executor for the estate of Linda Gregg. He is the author of Ghost Camera: Poems (2024).

Read Full Biography

Previous In Issue Next In Issue

Poem

From the magazine:Too Bright to See

By Linda Gregg

Just before dark the light gets dark. Violet

where my hands pull weeds around the Solomon’s seals.

I see…

Poem

From the magazine:Let Birds

By Linda Gregg

Eight deer on the slope

in the summer morning mist.

The night sky blue.

Me like a mare let out to pasture…

Poem

From the magazine:The Singers Change, the Music Goes On

By Linda Gregg

No one really dies in the myths.

No world is lost in the stories.

Everything is lost in the retelling,…

Author

Linda Gregg

Linda Gregg was born in New York and raised in Marin County, California. She earned both a BA and an MA from San Francisco State University. Gregg published several collections of poetry, including All of ...

Article

From the magazine:She Sang of Seeing

By Sophie Cabot Black

April 1, 2026

Her poems were lessons in how not to name things, but to instead evoke the outlines of what is seen.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1779536/a-poet-of-magnitude-and-intimacy at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Untitled [“When I was eleven”]

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Nature

Landscapes & Pastorals

Living

Youth

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

I

When I was eleven

I found a private river moving

Through the horse’s skull.

I carried that thing down

The mountain,

Watching my small shadow

Far away

On the other hill.

I buried it below my home;

In the woods,

Under the horrible violet myrtle,

Near my father’s creek.

II

Where I was afraid of something.

There are rivers, like doves; wonderful,

And your mouth ...

Tells me, your mouth,

How difficult

To drink only through the holes in that skull.

Forever

I will feel the foliage move above me;

Will lie near the wet roots

And stems, humming

On the water

My song.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was found in the Linda Gregg papers at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. Two apostrophes, indicating possessive nouns, have been added to lines three and twelve of the poem. A period has been added to line thirteen, following Gregg’s original document on which a period—handwritten—was inserted at some stage by the author. It is published by permission of the Estate of Linda Gregg. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779540/untitled-when-i-was-eleven at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

We Manage Most When We Manage Small

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Love

Romantic Love

Time & Brevity

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

What things are steadfast? Not the birds.

Not the bride and groom who hurry

in their brevity to reach one another.

The stars do not blow away as we do.

The heavenly things ignite and freeze.

But not as my hair falls before you.

Fragile and momentary, we continue.

Fearing madness in all things huge

and their requiring. Managing as thin light

on water. Managing only greetings

and farewells. We love a little, as the mice

huddle, as the goat leans against my hand.

As the lovers quickening, riding time.

Making safety in the moment. This touching

home goes far. This fishing in the air.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779542/we-manage-most-when-we-manage-small at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Too Bright to See

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Living

Sorrow & Grieving

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Grief

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

Just before dark the light gets dark. Violet

where my hands pull weeds around the Solomon’s seals.

I see with difficulty what before was easy.

Perceive what I saw before

but with more tight effort. I am moon

to what I am doing and what I was.

It is a real beauty that I lived

and dreamed would be, now know

but never then. Can tell by looking hard,

feeling which is weed and what is form.

My hands are intermediary. Neither lover

nor liar. Sweet being, if you are anywhere that hears,

come quickly. I weep, face set, no tears, mouth open.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779544/too-bright-to-see at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Marriage and Midsummer’s Night

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Love

Realistic & Complicated

Living

Marriage & Companionship

Relationships

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

It has been a long time now

since I stood in our dark room looking

across the court at my husband in her apartment.

Watched them make love.

She was perhaps more beautiful

from where I stood than to him.

I can say it now: she was like a vase

lit the way milky glass is lighted.

He looked more beautiful there

than I remember him the times

he entered my bed with the light behind.

It has been ten years since I sat

at the open window, my legs over the edge

and the knife close like a discarded idea.

Looked up at the Danish night,

that pale, pale sky where the birds that fly

at dawn flew on those days all night long,

black with the light behind. They were caught

by their instincts, unable to end their flight.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779546/marriage-and-midsummers-night at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Praising Spring

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Nature

Spring

Types/Modes

Ode

Joy & Contentment

Optimism

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

The day is taken by each thing and grows complete.

I go out and come in and go out again,

confused by a beauty that knows nothing of delay,

rushing like fire. All things move faster

than time and make a stillness thereby. My mind

leans back and smiles, having nothing to say.

Even at night I go out with a light and look

at the growing. I kneel and look at one thing

at a time. A white spider on a peony bud.

I have nothing to give, and make a poor servant,

but I can praise the spring. Praise this wildness

that does not heed the hour. The doe that does not

stop at dark but continues to grow all night long.

The beauty in every degree of flourishing. Violets

lift to the rain and the brook gets louder than ever.

The old German farmer is asleep and the flowers go on

opening. There are stars. Mint grows high. Leaves

bend in the sunlight as the rain continues to fall.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779548/praising-spring at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Persephone to the Other Husband

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Love

Heartache & Loss

Realistic & Complicated

Nature

Landscapes & Pastorals

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

Almost as soon as we got to Greece, the first evening

on the island, I tried to go back to you and our life.

Did it wrong. Made the same mistake as others,

confusing that home with death. Went to the graveyard

instead of the door opening back. I had become

ordinary again. Cats on the path fled away from me.

The sky was red and the world darkening. Thistles

shoulder-high were black against the silver Aegean.

I was going to steal a clay pot for your memory,

but the gate was locked. I looked through and discovered

candles lit in niches high on the gravestones.

Small lights shining among the cypress trees

as if for me. I saw how seriously they took the dark

and gave up. Went back to my new life. Past the prison

at the edge of town. Between two houses for the poor.

I stole a rose that grew over the wall of the villa

to give my husband in the house where I live now,

an apology for the unfaithfulness of this longing

after the dear mystery of owls in that different night.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in the spring 1987 issue of Antaeus. It is published by permission of the Estate of Linda Gregg. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779550/persephone-to-the-other-husband at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Grinding the Lens

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Living

Midlife

The Mind

Solitude

Joy & Contentment

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

I am pulling myself together.

Don’t want to go on a trip.

I have painted the living room white

and taken out most of my things.

The room has never been so empty.

Just now a banging thunder

and suddenly falling rain.

I leave the typewriter and run

outside in my nightgown and take

the cotton blanket off the line.

It is summer and I am in the middle

of my life. Alone and happy.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779552/grinding-the-lens at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The War

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Nature

Animals

Living

Arts & Sciences

Philosophy

Reading & Books

Disappointment

Melancholy & Despair

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

We were at the border and they were checking

the luggage. We had been talking about Lermontov’s

novel, A Hero of  Our Time. John liked Petorin

because he was so modern during that transition

from one history to another. I talked about Vera

and Princess Mary, the old man and the others

Petorin hurt. I said there was no reckoning for him,

that he was not held accountable as in Tolstoy

or Dostoevsky. Maybe morality does change,

I was thinking, but suffering does not. Then

a scorpion crawled from a bundle on the table.

He fell to the floor and scurried across the room.

The men were delighted. One crouched down and held

the scorpion with a ballpoint pen while he cut off

the poisoned stinger at the end of the tail,

the scorpion stretched out was as long as a hand.

The men gathered around, some with open pocketknives

held shoulder high. The man picked up the scorpion

by the tail and put it on his friend who yelped,

jumping away. The men laughed. The scorpion fell.

Another man picked it up and threw it lightly

against the wall. The scorpion fell and kept trying,

scuttling across the tiles toward the open door.

He kept his tail high, threatening, but looked tired.

Somebody else picked up the scorpion and I told John

I was going. We went outside where there was nothing.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779554/the-war at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Asking for Directions

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Love

Heartache & Loss

Living

Separation & Divorce

Activities

Travels & Journeys

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

We could have been mistaken for a married couple

riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago

that last time we were together. I remember

looking out the window and praising the beauty

of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world

with its back turned to us, the small neglected

stations of our history. I slept across your

chest and stomach without asking permission

because they were the last hours. There was

a smell to the sheepskin lining of your new

Chinese vest that I didn’t recognize. I felt

it deliberately. I woke early and asked you

to come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more,

and I said we only had one hour and you came.

We didn’t say much after that. In the station,

you took your things and handed me the vest,

then left as we had planned. So you would have

ten minutes to meet your family and leave.

I stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion

and the absoluteness of the end, so still I was

aware of myself breathing. I put on the vest

and my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you

through the dirty window standing outside looking

up at me. We looked at each other without any

expression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still.

That moment is what I will tell of as proof

that you loved me permanently. After that I was

a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker

which direction to walk to find a taxi.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779556/asking-for-directions at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Let Birds

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Love

Desire & Passion

Nature

Animals

Passion

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

Eight deer on the slope

in the summer morning mist.

The night sky blue.

Me like a mare let out to pasture.

The Tao does not console me.

I was given the Way

in the milk of childhood.

Breathing its waking and sleeping.

But now there is no amazing smell

of sperm on my thighs,

no spreading it on my stomach

to show pleasure.

I will never give up longing.

I will let my hair stay long.

The rain proclaims these trees,

the trees tell of the sun.

Let birds, let birds.

Let leaf  be passion.

Let jaw, let teeth, let tongue be

between us. Let joy.

Let entering. Let rage and calm join.

Let quail come.

Let winter impress you. Let spring.

Allow the lost ocean to wake in you.

Let the mare in the field

in the summer morning mist

make you whinny. Make you come

to the fence and whinny. Let birds.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779558/let-birds at May 7, 2026 at 7:49 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

As Being Is Eternal

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

The Mind

Solitude

Time & Brevity

Arts & Sciences

Poetry & Poets

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

She is sitting alone in the bright room.

There are two other rooms, one dark

and closed, the other with a single light.

Outside there is a cold November.

She is remembering the statues

she saw in Greece on the mountain,

in empty rooms where light was added

to light, surrounded by silence.

They seemed ready to be seen.

The way one hears a door quietly

close and footsteps coming closer.

Present and past like that. The way

art is exact. Like the woman

in her lighted room.

She could rise and walk

into one of the empty rooms

that she is not in. Could see

a vase of red roses on the table

where white roses were last week.

Time has finished its journey,

has come its long half way.

The air is heavy as water as she

bends her head over the page.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779560/as-being-is-eternal at May 7, 2026 at 7:50 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Staying After

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Living

Growing Old

The Mind

Memory & Nostalgia

Arts & Sciences

Poetry & Poets

Joy & Contentment

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

I grew up with horses and poems

when that was the time for that.

Then Ginsberg and Orlovsky

in the Fillmore West when

everybody was dancing. I sat

in the balcony with my legs

pushed through the railing,

watching  Janis Joplin sing.

Women have houses now, and children.

I live alone in a kind of luxury.

I wake when I feel like it,

read what Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva.

At night I watch the apartments

whose windows are still lit

after midnight. I fell in love.

I believed people. And even now

I love the yellow light shining

down on the dirty brick wall.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779562/staying-after at May 7, 2026 at 7:50 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

After the Fires

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Living

Growing Old

The Mind

Memory & Nostalgia

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

Now that you are old, you have moved inland,

surrounded by trees and a river hidden below.

You walk there with your life inside you.

The scenes, the arrangements and dissertations

on the bounty of women, the flecks of their hair color,

and all the rest. With your age upon you,

your boxes of papers and pictures cut out of

the National Geographic ranging from the forties

to the present, to know the world that was yours.

It makes me remember the fires that were built

on the beaches when I was young. Huge fires

made out of what was there. I remember what

they looked like when the fires went out.

Plenty of logs left blackened, held by the wet

and high tides. I stand with the size

of the burnt-out fires the morning after

and listen to the quiet young ocean.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779564/after-the-fires at May 7, 2026 at 7:50 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Singers Change, the Music Goes On

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Living

Death

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Mythology & Folklore

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

No one really dies in the myths.

No world is lost in the stories.

Everything is lost in the retelling,

in being wondered at. We grow up

and grow old in our land of grass

and blood moons, births and goneness.

We live our myth in the recurrence,

pretending we will return another day.

Like the morning coming every morning.

The truth is we come back as a choir.

Otherwise Eurydice would be forever

in the dark. Our singing brings her

back. Our dying keeps her alive.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779566/the-singers-change-the-music-goes-on at May 7, 2026 at 7:50 PM EDT.

LINDA GREGG | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Arriving

By Linda Gregg

Poem categories

Nature

Landscapes & Pastorals

Living

Death

The Mind

Doubt & Contemplation

Time & Brevity

Poet categories

North America

U.S., Western

What do they say about the land of the dead?

About the ceremony of the body?

About women in long dresses?

What do they say about the innocence of the flesh?

What about the endeavor in nature

at ease with the dance and music?

Long ago beyond graves are worlds in state.

The cities still there in ruin. The neck of the ibex.

Walled gardens surrounded by desert.

Imagined lions guarding the gate.

All as it was before.

Worlds out of time still exist.

Worlds of achievement out of mind and remembering

just as the poem lasts.

In the concert of being present.

I have lost my lover and my youth.

I want to praise the meadow, the horse

rolling over in the river with me

as a girl underneath it. Surviving to see

the ferns in the woods, sunlight on blond hills.

And the aged apple trees

in a valley where there used to be a cabin.

Where someone lived. And where small inedible apples

grow. That the deer will eat.

Notes:

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1779568/arriving at May 7, 2026 at 7:50 PM EDT.

SOPHIE CABOT BLACK | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

She Sang of Seeing

Her poems were lessons in how not to name things, but to instead evoke the outlines of what is seen.

By Sophie Cabot Black

Originally Published: April 1, 2026

I first encountered Linda Gregg’s poems in a workshop at Columbia University in 1982. A fellow student slipped me a folded note with the words TOO BRIGHT TO SEE scrawled inside. After class he handed over a copy of the slim, blue book by that name—Linda’s debut, recently published by Graywolf Press. The collection was like nothing I’d ever encountered: luminous and singular, it sang of seeing.

I was astonished by what she could do with so little. Her poems were lessons in how not to name things, but to instead evoke the outlines of what is seen. Images were simplified, landscapes were drawn from her nomadic life: Marin County, Copenhagen, Greece, Western Massachusetts, New York City, among other places.

Linda was the mistress of a certain kind of compression. Each of her poems resembles a snow globe, not so much fixed in time as containing all time. Each poem is made by its own weather, ever sturdy, able to draw what it needs when it needs. A system unto itself.

In the opening lines of the book’s first poem, “We Manage Most When We Manage Small,” we see what W.S. Merwin first saw in Linda’s work—that it “conveys at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance”:

What things are steadfast? Not the birds.

Not the bride and groom who hurry

in their brevity to reach one another.

The stars do not blow away as we do.

The heavenly things ignite and freeze.

But not as my hair falls before you.

Fragile and momentary, we continue.

In the book’s title poem, we find the beginning of  her aesthetic, her manifesto:

I see with difficulty what before was easy.

Perceive what I saw before

but with more tight effort. I am moon

to what I am doing and what I was.

It is a real beauty that I lived

and dreamed would be, now know

but never then. Can tell by looking hard,

feeling which is weed and what is form.

I can’t remember when I first met Linda. What I do remember is her lilting, yet grounded, voice. She was a sprite, but she was fierce; she was a spirit, but she was on fire. We were a small gang of New York City poets who looped in and out of poetry readings, classes, and book parties, piling into taxis, trying to get from one end of Manhattan to the other. Linda folded in, game for any adventure and up for staying up all night. While she centered herself in her poems precisely to disappear into them, with us she did not want to be at the center, did not take up any air. She was the air.

____

Linda published six slim, idiosyncratic collections: Too Bright to See (1981), Alma (1985), The Sacraments of Desire (1991), Chosen by the Lion (1995), Things and Flesh (1999), and In the Middle Distance (2006). Her New and Selected appeared in 2008, eleven years before she died of cancer in 2019. Read back-to-back, these books reveal a few stylistic leaps, yet Linda’s project remains singular: she is interested in what lasts—and, in particular, what lasts not by accident or despite human folly but by virtue of its sacredness.

In her work she often chooses absence, marked by incomplete sentences, omitted verbs, whole poems bereft of obvious metaphor. Her poems can read like lists of observations, as if the speaker is standing before a painting. Consider these lines from “The Last Night in Mithymna”:

Wind heaving in the trees.

My room quiet and warm.

Me on a thin mattress,

looking at the full moon.

The sky black around her face.

By keeping the subject from her lines, she instead allows the world to speak louder. By leaving out verbs, she sets up her version of memento mori. Without metaphor, the poem relies on other variables such as syntax,
repetition, and music.

____

In her essay “The Art of Finding,” Linda notes: “To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.” It is this seeing, this finding, that we are given in her work, as if we too discover alongside her. Her method of adding yet another fragment, another piece of the puzzle, marks us as collaborators.

At a reading at Indian Valley Colleges in Novato, California, in 1976, she described her process for writing poems:

Maybe it just takes a minute actually to write. But the sense of it is, metaphorically, that I write the poem and it takes me a long time—like walking a long way to the end of the poem. And near the end, my intelligence is running like crazy catching up. And that’s what makes the form of the poem, I think, and gets on top of the poem, and is able to see the poem from on top. That usually happens right at the very last minute.... My allegiances are very much with that person who’s running to catch up, even though I live very much within the other part of myself.

Over the years, as her books were published, Linda doubled down on her creations. Her snow globes never clouded, even as her undertaking became more unblinking, more unflinching. Her work achieved a spare beauty. In time, certain poems—“Let Birds,” “The Weight,” “Growing Up,” “Chosen by the Lion,” “New York Address,” “I Thought on His Desire for Three Days,” and “Highway 90,” among others—became iconic. Again and again, she found abundance in the minimal, wholeness after the departed, joy in the unselfing of self. She was a poet of extraordinary directness. Each poem is like a small, ancient monolith, unearthed roots and all, as in “The Heart Flowing Out,” which begins:

All things we see are the shapes death makes.

When we see straightly and hard we see

with the eyes of death.

There was so much more I wanted to hear from Linda. During our hours-long conversations she mostly shared where she was and whom she had just seen. Like most poets, we never spoke about our process or our current projects. Instead, we gossiped and commiserated over those no longer with us. While I rinsed the day’s buckets and dishes, untangling the phone cord, I could hear each cigarette climbing around Linda’s words. And from time to time, even when I thought she might not be around, I’d call her East Village apartment just to hear the ring disturb the bed, the table, her absence.

____

Linda’s interactions with the sacred never faltered. She saw the elemental in all the difficult gods, as if on some ancient, terraced path; she was, as she says, an “intermediary.” Her clear-eyed gaze at the garden—both at weed and the statuary within—was not only crucial, but for her the only way to achieve such luminosity of purpose. Only Linda, always going back to the same place to ask the same question, could have made such precise significance. As she wrote in “The Bounty After the Bounty”:

Having is the mistaken focus of desire.

It is not the point. The statue is

camouflage for the emptiness left behind.

One could argue that, in the end, her idea of beauty killed her. She lived for it no matter the consequences. She chased it ruthlessly, even as she stilled herself; her four months in the desert without speaking, or on the outskirts of a village on a Greek island, or running the horses, walking New England autumns or the downtown loneliness of her New York apartment—what did she abandon in order to find again? It was not silence—for most of us the prerequisite for writing poems. Not joy, or her angelic giggle. Not birds, not love, not words, not touch. Not longing, not beauty.

This essay is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing.” Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Raised on a small New England farm, poet Sophie Cabot Black received a BA from Marlboro College and an MFA from Columbia University. Her collections of poetry include Geometry of the Restless Herd (2024), The Exchange (2013), The Descent (2004), which won the Connecticut Book Award, and The Misunderstanding of Nature (1994), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. ...

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Linda Gregg

Linda Gregg was born in New York and raised in Marin County, California. She earned both a BA and an MA from San Francisco State University. Gregg published several collections of poetry, including All of ...

Article

From the magazine:

A Poet of Magnitude and Intimacy: On Linda Gregg

By David Semanki

April 1, 2026

Gregg lived as she wrote, winnowing down life to bare essentials, which, in turn, made space for the visionary to reveal itself.

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1779570/she-sang-of-seeing at May 7, 2026 at 7:50 PM EDT.

COMMENT

- Poets of My Age and the Erotics of Influence

DAVID WOO | MAY 7, 2026, 7:48 PM EDT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Poets of My Age and the Erotics of Influence

On loving poets through decades of poetry and living.

By David Woo

Originally Published: April 1, 2026

Art by Eiko Ojala.

Living in San Francisco during the AIDS crisis in 1990, I delayed getting an HIV test until any symptom—a bruise, a cough—fractured my sense of well-being. Back then, the blood draw led to weeks of anxious waiting, and the testing center refused to relay the results by phone in case the patient needed counseling for what was a terminal illness. By the time I arrived at the Mission District center, my dread was monstrous and implacable. When the nurse spoke, I was so certain I was seropositive that I mistook his “negative” for bad news. I must have gazed blankly, unresponsive. He said he would be back in a minute and returned with another nurse, who repeated my good news in Cantonese. Both of them were startled when I began to laugh helplessly. A year or so later, I opened a copy of The New Yorker and found Henri Cole’s poem “Forty Days and Forty Nights.” It begins, “Opening a vein he called my radial/the phlebotomist introduced himself as Angel ...” As I reached the ending, which didn’t disclose the speaker’s test result
(“I watched the verdict-lips move”), a tear raised a rounded welt on the page of the magazine.

____

To fall in love with poets is part of my practice of poetry. I don’t mean it’s commonplace, although it’s more common than falling in love in real life. I can love many more aspects of poets than I can of lovers, qualities I may not welcome in a person, like unrelenting strangeness, austerity, or audacity. At the same time, my love of poets is faithless and transactional. I love them until another poet comes along. I love them to aid the inspiration of a poem I’m writing. I love them while reading them, but not when I think about them later. Unlike a partner whom I eventually grow to resemble, I do not wish to become them. I’m enraptured by their beauty in order to learn what I should avoid, since they’ve done it so beautifully already. The act of avoidance may be the subtlest form of praise, a tender form of negative influence. Every line I write holds the contours of their absence.

The dominant models of how poetic influence operates—the strenuously competitive psychological agon of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” T. S. Eliot’s impassioned argument in favor of a dryly impersonal “relation to the dead poets”—neglect some supple poetic effects, like what the queer scholar Stephen Guy-Bray calls “the erotics of influence,” in which poetry is the burden that weighs upon us like “the erotic pressure of a beloved body.” To feel a pressure so lustily material that it induces a physical response—tears, breathlessness—is a weight I bear with pleasure.

Of course, “falling in love” with a poet doesn’t mean that I desire to declare my love to the actual poet. The erotic may be overtly sexual in poetry, but it’s more likely to be elliptical, as when the ancient Roman poet Horace wonders why the young man preparing for a wrestling match avoids slathering himself with olive oil as if it were viper’s blood. In an interview with Nick Flynn, Carl Phillips spoke of these metaphorical uses when he mentioned that poetic syntax itself contains great potential for the erotic: “stall-and-deliver, release-and-restraint.”

I fell in love with Phillips’s work, in part, because of his distinctive syntax,
with its switchback deployments of meaning, like what his poem “Fall Colors,” from his superb recent collection Scattered Snows, to the North (2024), calls “a ramble, where each corner we turn feels like a turning, as well,/of imagination.” The erotics of a Phillips poem might begin with a kind of seduction, its subject capturing the reader’s attention not with the blandishments of a lover but with the astonishment of something real. In the case of “Fall Colors,” the subject is the brutally honest recognition that all of the speaker’s friendships lacked “warmth and compassion.” As the poem proceeds, it becomes an uncovering of why this was so, recalling the frank judgment of “the only man I think I’ve ever loved absolutely,” before shifting to self-recrimination:

how

much of my time I spend pretending I’m not afraid, negotiating
this life

with all the seeming casualness with which a man whose business involves

the handling of fires daily

daily handles a fire.

Phillips’s syntactical form—here chiasmic mirroring with a mid-line break—feels intimate and erotic. The speaker labors to capture the crux of his subject, going back and forth in a kind of copulating rhythm as he veers and emends and shifts toward his fearful conclusion: his essentially friendless self may be a mere “imitation of a self I want others to believe in enough for me eventually/to believe it, too.” What remains, he implies, is the shell of a person, alone except for his dog on their late November “ramble.”

All the turns and extensions of syntax model the struggle to convey a moral journey with unsparing verisimilitude. As the poem progresses, I identify with the poet as with a lover, while wondering about my own friendships and selfhood. By the end, my sense of the poem’s eroticism lies in the force of its penetration into my mind. The ramble becomes not only a vision of the speaker’s late-autumnal age but of my own, the lengthening shadows of man and dog, an intimation of our common mortality.

____

The AIDS epidemic killed friends and a multitude of strangers during my formative twenties and thirties. That it also obstructed my personal life for decades was the particular fate of my own character. The unfolding gift of gay poetry offered me respite from my own estrangements—and not just respite, a form of erotic imagining that helped me come to terms with the real association of sex and death. Many of the poets that I followed in that era, like Reginald Shepherd, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, and Essex Hemphill, are gone, but many have survived and flourished, with valuable new additions to their oeuvres.

Going back at least to Horace, born 65 BCE, who may have called Virgil, born 70 BCE, “half of my soul,” poets near in age often assume a distinctive place in a poet’s consciousness. Just as the first classmates who married or had children couldn’t help but signify something about where I stood in the trajectory of my life, the poets in my age cohort who first published poems that I admired or who received acclaim became markers of my progress as a young poet.

Three poets with recently published books, Carl Phillips, Henri Cole, and Cyrus Cassells, are all gay men who were born within three years of me in the late fifties and who have been pieces of my poetic soul for much of my adult life. When I read them today, the years have stripped away the need to compare poetic “progress.” Nowadays I summon a more bountiful context—our shared decades of poetry and living—and appreciate their poetry more for what it achieves on its own than for what it can tell me about how to approach the formal elements in my own work. I feel a personal, almost intimate engagement with the ways in which their latest poems—and now their social media—are navigating an utterly changed cultural landscape.

____

When I first read Cassells’s third collection, Beautiful Signor (1997), its unabashed, homoerotic romance seemed a lifeline to love’s possibility. In a section of “The Magician-Made Tree,” he wrote:

your body, siphoned for a while

of sorrow—

will I ever love you more

than in this place

where voices of reproach

can’t reach us.

If to be “siphoned of sorrow” through a vision of a “beautiful signor” offered consolation, Phillips’s From the Devotions, published a year later, in 1998, captivated me with its conflations, more provocative than consoling, of the sacred and the erotic, like this image from “The Gods”:

recall Christ, then (all over)

the boy you found lying restive,

(among the sand, the salt grass),

naked—save for the words breakfast included

lipsticked onto his chest in thick, plum letters.

By the time Cole’s Middle Earth appeared in 2003, I found the disarray of my own coming of age reflected in the gorgeous lyricism of poems like “Self-portrait in a Gold Kimono”:

The essence of self emerges

shuttling between parents.

Noel, the wet nimbus of Noel’s tongue

draws me out of the pit.

I drop acid with Rita.

Chez Woo eros is released.

I eat sugar like a canary from a grown man’s tongue.

I admit that I contemplated “Chez Woo eros is released” as if it were a sibylline, erotic summons from a leading poetic voice of my time. That the line was referring not to me but to the verb “to woo” or its revolting offshoot “woo-woo,” which may derive from the theremin in old sci-fi movies, was something an admirer surnamed Woo might conveniently ignore.

____

In Eros the Bittersweet (1986), Anne Carson states that “all utterance is erotic in some sense,” that just as “writer and reader bring together two halves of one meaning, so lover and beloved are matched together like two sides of one knucklebone.” The eros of other poets’ oeuvres, their Platonic life force, opens what Carson calls a common “erotic space,” where imagination plays in the gap between the reader and the poet, “linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference.” As a young poet, I learned a viable range of voice and form from Phillips, Cole, Cassells, and others. At the same time, while composing a poem, I stepped away from that erotic space to avoid any divergence from my own inspiration.

Quote: As a young poet, I learned a viable range of voice and form from Phillips, Cole, Cassells, and others. At the same time, while composing a poem, I stepped away from that erotic space to avoid any divergence from my own inspiration.. Unquote.

As a young poet, I learned a viable range of voice and form from Phillips, Cole, Cassells, and others. At the same time, while composing a poem, I stepped away from that erotic space to avoid any divergence from my own

inspiration.

My first book, The Eclipses (2005), was, in part, a fantasia on the family poem. It focuses on the death of my mother, not only because the subject was foremost in my mind but because I was searching for lyrical extensions of the autobiographical and found it in versions of what Freud called the “family romance.” Cole, in particular, was a model for this material.

In my second book, Divine Fire (2021), I sought to broaden my themes to include the sacred, the sublime, the literary, the erotic. As if to declare my independence from my previous book, I included a piece called “The Death of the Family Poem.” I broadened, too, my range of tonalities and forms. Wit, subtlety, and a kind of disabused irony were the ideals. Here, Phillips was a touchstone. A high-style, apex-queer mode appealed to me (as it does to this day), and I was fully aware of the ways in which contemporary culture mediated against entire ranges of expression. However much the complex sentences of Proust and late Henry James reflected my own ideals of syntax and style, they were no longer the sound of our times.

All three poets’ newest collections—Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North, Cole’s The Other Love, and Cassells’s Everything in Life Is Resurrection: Selected Poems, 1982–2022—bestow a bristling sense of how the culture has changed, even if the poets themselves complicate facile conclusions. For example, the notion that our language has been dumbed down to what Tony Judt in The New York Review of Books once termed “inarticulacy,” with “self-expression” favored over “form,” is belied by the increasing complexity of Phillips’s syntax and the variability in Cassells’s emotional directness, and is only superficially true of Cole’s chastened diction.

Cole’s first book, The Marble Queen (1986), was indebted to certain paragons—Hart Crane’s lush romanticism, Elizabeth Bishop’s observant perfectionism, James Merrill’s formal elaborations. The young poet who wrote “the azure room where mercury youth dissolved,/sun-spurged beneath the brown-beamed, blossom-/blown ceiling,” would not have written, as the older Cole does in The Other Love, “Are you going to shoot
me,/motherfucker...?” or “I felt like I might puke.” These latter phrases employ a contemporary register, not for woolly self-expression but because what we consider effective language has changed. While Cole’s sophistication hasn’t waned, he has divested himself of what Louise Glück called “the arsenal of devices that had come to seem static or imprisoning.” The Other Love is frank, funny, unsettling, and tonally virtuosic in its artful critique of the present moment, offering the imperfect individuality of the poet as a moral counterweight to the violence that the powers that be are inflicting upon the world. The speaker is a version of Cole himself, a queer poet with a congenital need for solitude and a sexual vanity affronted by the diminutions of age. He’s serious yet ironic about his calling, adamantly refusing to confuse his identity as a poet with what he’s not, someone who has the charisma to change the world. In “Komorebi,” the speaker watches on television how “helicopters and armored vehicles confront young people,” but he leads “a cautious, quiet life” far from such commotion. “Inside the walls of my abode,” he writes,

I am a novitiate to the Art of Poetry.

Though I dig home cooking more than threesomes,

I would never say, “You are so fine, Henri.”

Cole has stated that he believes a poem is “organized violence.” In his work, this violence is not that of gunships and tanks but of a more subtle encroachment on the reader’s mind. The earnest yet off-kilter train of thought here—his somewhat unhip diction (“the walls of my abode,” “dig”), his monastic, zero-sum game involving sex (“threesomes”) and staying at home as a “novitiate” to the Art of Poetry (note the self-consciously pretentious capital letters), his weirdly narcissistic disclaimer about personal superiority (what sort of person would find the phrase “You are so fine, Henri” a plausible form of self-talk?)—is a tart little injection of charm and idiosyncrasy directly to the brain.

With Cassells, the belief that poetry was ineffective as an instrument for political change has given way to more direct engagement. As he noted in an interview, he has moved from “a very mystical sort of book” to subjects that have “a lot of gritty, political dimension to them.” In Everything in Life Is Resurrection (2025), the desire to memorialize acts of great political violence is evident from the start in poems like “The Memory of Hiroshima” and continues with poems about the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, and migrant detention camps.

The strength of the Hiroshima poem, which is remarkable for having been written when we were still undergraduates at Stanford, lies in the understated plainness of its witness: “The impact came/at the moment of soft laughter./There was a shock of light./The house shredded.” By contrast, more recent poems, like one about an Arizona border activist and another about a Latino victim of gun violence, use a more clotted, tendentious style to draw attention to such alarming phenomena as “The rash, all-too-daily report,/The out-of-the-blue bullet” and “our bigotry-is-commonplace republic’s/Chaos.” What might have been unpersuasive and stilted to a seventies English professor may now be the most direct way to cultivate political outrage in the 2020s. But, in what’s become known as “the attention economy,” how can poetry garner any?

____

Long before the online era, as an idealistic young poet, I chose to focus on reading and writing poetry and not seek attention for my work otherwise.
I decided not to go into academia and publishing, which I considered tangential to what I, like Cole’s speaker, revered as the Art of Poetry. Networking, I naïvely thought, was a game played by venture capitalists and divorce lawyers.

My post-hippie anti-careerism corresponded to the views of many college acquaintances, who changed, in varying degrees, over time and by necessity. Even though I, too, have made pragmatic compromises, my default mode regarding poetry remains to find anything that wanders too far from the work itself—the reading and writing of poems—to be irrelevant or a waste of time. I’ve been fascinated by how poets of my age have adapted to a culture overrun by commercial interests and online technology. If what draws me to these poets is the eros of their work, their adaptations to our times—through social media, promotional tours, and the compulsory extroversion of their networking—can feel like a draining away of the interiority and allurement of the art itself.

Quote: If I return to the social media feeds of favorite poets, it is because their best posts echo the sensibility of their poetry.. Unquote.

If I return to the social media feeds of favorite poets, it is because their best posts echo the sensibility of their

poetry.

One day, I opened up my Instagram feed, and Cyrus Cassells’s profile displayed a puppet in a museum in Buenos Aires, a little matador with bilious skin and eerily blue eyelids. Another day, Henri Cole shared a photo of a robin in a backyard birdbath and said, in his mischievous way, “They drink, and splash, and poop all at the same time. I wish I could do this.” Yet another day, Carl Phillips’s page showed a photo of a homemade plate of spinach timbale and Moroccan stuffed pepper. “The verdict: culinary eleganza, darling,” he wrote.

While enjoying these posts, I wonder what the medium provides established poets and how it affects readers of their work. It’s nothing new to say that Instagram is a late-capitalist, mercenary entity that can nurture a vapid community of interactive solipsisms, with its faux-casual artifice of hypercurated self-presentations, its dopamine rushes of “likes” and “follows,” its algorithmic compulsions and browbeating sales pitches, its vanity-fair influencers, and its emojis of support from “friends” who may be strangers. And yet, in the roughly six months, at this writing, that I’ve engaged with the medium, creating some posts and following a few hundred poets, I’ve come to see its significance to the business of poetry. Instagram offers poets, both emerging and established, easy access to readers at a time when the volume of coverage by critics who commit their professional lives to new poetry books may not be enough to support poetry as a living, viable art. The social aspect of the medium offers many opportunities to nurture connections with poets, former students, and other readers. In pre-Internet days, the only image of Cassells, Cole, or Phillips I would have been able to call up was an actual memory of Cassells, handsome, with a sly look of surmise, at a get-together at Stanford University’s “Gay People’s Union” when I was nineteen and he twenty-one. Now, the proliferation of memory-giving images is staggering.

If I return to the social media feeds of favorite poets, it is because their best posts echo the sensibility of their poetry. With Cassells’s matador puppet in Buenos Aires, the blue eyelids remind me of the line in “The Way of Duende,” “a dark and sobersided blue I’ve found/only in Andalusia,” invoking the eros of cosmopolitan otherness that imbues his best work.

When, on Mother’s Day, Cole posts a fading color photo of his mother and himself as a toddler on a beach (like the cover of his collection Touch), with the caption “Mothers are the holiest thing,” the tone is as hard to pin down as in his poems, both loving and ironic in his unsettling way, and I recall the decidedly unholy portrait he has created in many memorable poems about her. In The Other Love, he writes the shocking yet comically deadpan lines, “He was glad his mother was dead;/she had Overbearing Mother Disease.”

As for Phillips, a casual post captures some of Instagram’s contradictions and the complex way his mind operates in his poetry. Under an image of his debut, In the Blood (1992), he mentions that he is reading proofs for his publisher’s reissue of the book. (Still in the closet while writing it, Phillips was sympathetically outed by Rachel Hadas’s prescient foreword, which recognized the anonymous submitter of the prize manuscript as “a poet of color who is erotically drawn to other men.”) Of the excellent sestina “Birdland” that he’s now proofing, he says, “What a lot of work I went to, just to describe cruising (sex, not the boat kind) lol ... FWIW I hadn’t ever cruised when I wrote this—the powers of imagination!” With a few choice phrases, Phillips’s post tells us that the sophisticated sexuality of the early poem (“A cool disinterest/is, above all, essential in the particular field/you’ve entered”) wasn’t a product of personal experience but a result of the same creative cunning for which he would become renowned. The surface falsehood wasn’t a lie because poetry is a product of the fictive imagination, and literal-minded interpreters should remember this truth, though he’s surrendered the desire to impose his understanding (“for what it’s worth”). All of this dazzling implication arrives in what is also transparently an advertisement. As with much of Phillips’s work, he creates an eros of moral tension that readers can succumb to, if they so choose. In Scattered Snows, to the North, he speaks of how, in certain situations, “what’s false, being all you can see,/becomes the past that justifies/all the things you are.”

I’m emphasizing the continuity of these poets’ oeuvres with the sensibilities projected by their social media because I wish to suggest how authors can present themselves in our current cultural landscape without compromising the ethos of their poetry. It matters if, when trying to focus on what I’m reading—a pulsing syntax, an overbearing mother, a loving Signor—I conjure instead images of the Instagram version of the poet incessantly hawking an image of themselves. For all the age-old arts, like poetry, that arise from fundamental human faculties and that manage to endure in our acquisitive culture, both artists and audiences must figure out how much of their limited time to spend on aspects of artistic life extraneous to the work itself and how much on cultivating the erotic space necessary to create and appreciate the art.

In the end, what fascinates me about the poets of my age—not only Cole, Phillips, and Cassells, but others I could have gone to college with, like Catherine Barnett, Don Mee Choi, Kimiko Hahn, Karl Kirchwey, Li-Young Lee, Campbell McGrath, Diane Seuss, Patricia Smith, Susan Wheeler, Cynthia Zarin, and many more—is how they, unlike poets of other generations and eras, generate a dizzying simultaneity. My engagements with their oeuvres and lives across decades exist all at once in a transfigured present. At its best, the eroticism of their bodies of work presses against me not with accumulating pressure, but the opposite: a rising lightness that I associate with light itself and even the gods—household gods, perhaps, like the ones in Cavafy, who safeguard and influence someone in the prime of youth until they hear the Furies outside and scurry away, permitting the end, as it must, to arrive in a flurry of dust.

The son of immigrants from China, David Woo was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. He studied English at Harvard and Stanford and Chinese at Yale, and was a Wallace Stegner fellow in poetry at Stanford. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Eclipses (2005), which won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, and Divine Fire (2021). Woo’s work has been widely published in magazines such as the New...

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Author

Carl Phillips

Referred to as “one of America’s most original, influential, and productive of lyric poets,” Carl Phillips is the author of more than 16 books. He was born in Everett, Washington in 1959, and his family moved...

Author

Cyrus Cassells

Born in Dover, Delaware in 1957, Cyrus Cassells grew up in the Mojave Desert near Los Angeles, California. He earned a BA from Stanford University. In 2019, his poetry collection The Gospel According to Wild...

Author

Henri Cole

Born in Fukuoka, Japan, and raised in Virginia, poet Henri Cole grew up in a household where French, Armenian, and English were spoken. He earned a BA at the College of William and Mary, an MA at the University...

This article was downloaded from https://poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1779576/poets-of-my-age-and-the-erotics-of-influence at May 7, 2026 at 7:50 PM EDT.

Table of Contents

Poetry: April 2026

Poems

Editor’s Note, April 2026

Mask of Khonsu

Corn Mummy

Scribes

Grief Lessons

A Room of Its Own

Don’t Look Up

Cicatrix

Y.

Y.

L.

L.

I.

I.

K.

K.

O.

O.

S is for _____, with a Line from Keats

Tangzhong, with a Line from Genet

Gunderson

smokes

the patient line

Orbit

Ode on Humidity

smudge

والآن، تعالَ أيُّها الكِتاب

Enter Book

والآن، تعالَيْ يا ظِلالَ الأشجار

Enter Shadows

الآن، تعالَيْ أيَّتُها الدُّموع

Enter Tears

والآن، تعالَيْ أيَّتُها الجينات

Enter Genetics

On Translating Dalia Taha

two ships

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

The Pelicans Can No Longer Reach You

My Albatross

“There ain’t no preachers/b*tches in this park no more!”

In Which the Rapture Misses Bushwick

Innocence

Gay Marriage

The End of the Visit

LINDA GREGG: NEVER GIVE UP LONGING

A Poet of Magnitude and Intimacy: On Linda Gregg

Untitled [“When I was eleven”]

We Manage Most When We Manage Small

Too Bright to See

Marriage and Midsummer’s Night

Praising Spring

Persephone to the Other Husband

Grinding the Lens

The War

Asking for Directions

Let Birds

As Being Is Eternal

Staying After

After the Fires

The Singers Change, the Music Goes On

Arriving

She Sang of Seeing

COMMENT

Poets of My Age and the Erotics of Influence