Day 6 - Consider the Hands that Write this Letter

Consider the Hands that Write This Letter

after Marina Wilson

Consider the hands
that write this letter.
The left palm pressed flat against the paper,
as it has done before, over my heart,
in peace or reverence
to the sea or some beautiful thing
I saw once, felt once: snow falling
like rice flung from the giants’ wedding,
or the strangest birds. & consider, then,
the right hand, & how it is a fist,
within which a sharpened utensil,
similar to the way I’ve held a spade,
match to the wick, the horse’s reins,
loping, the very fists
I’ve seen from the roads to Limay & Estelí.
For years, I have come to sit this way:
one hand open, one hand closed,
like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up
the food that comes from that farming.
Or, yes, it is like the way I’ve danced
with my left hand opened around a shoulder
& my right hand closed inside
of another hand. & how
I pray, I pray for this
to be my way: sweet
work alluded to in the body’s position
to its paper:
left hand, right hand
like an open eye, an eye closed:
one hand flat against the trapdoor,
the other hand knocking, knocking.

-Aracelis Girmay
From Teeth by Aracelis Girmay. Copyright © 2007

Day 5 - The Fuel That Feeds You

Hidden

If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has
swallowed it.

If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.

No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

Day 4 - Pictures of Home

Pictures of Home

In the red-roofed stucco house
of my childhood, the dining room
was screened off by folding doors
with small glass panes. Our neighbors
the Bertins, who barely escaped Hitler,
often joined us at table. One night
their daughter said, In Vienna
our dining room had doors like these.
For a moment, we all sat quite still.

And when Nath Nong, who has to live
in Massachusetts now, saw a picture
of green Cambodian fields she said,
My father have animal like this,
name krebey English? I told her,
Water buffalo. She said, Very very
good animal. She put her finger
on the picture of the water buffalo
and spoke its Khmer name once more.

So today, when someone (my ex-
husband) sends me a shiny picture
of a church in Santa Cruz that lost
its steeple in the recent earthquake
there’s no reason at all
for my throat to ache at the sight
of a Pacific-blue sky and an old church
three thousand miles away, because
if I can only save enough money

I can go back there any time
and stay as long as I want.

-Julie Hill Alger

Day 3 - Skin Remembers

Two Countries

-Naomi Shihab Nye

Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers–silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.

Day 2: The Woman in the Ordinary

The Woman in the Ordinary

The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl
is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.
Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself
under ripples of conversation and debate.
The woman in the block of ivory soap
has massive thighs that neigh,
great breasts that blare and strong arms that trumpet.
The woman of the golden fleece
laughs uproariously from the belly
inside the girl who imitates
a Christmas card virgin with glued hands,
who fishes for herself in other’s eyes,
who stoops and creeps to make herself smaller.
In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,
a yam of a woman of butter and brass,
compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,
like a handgrenade set to explode,
like goldenrod ready to bloom.

-Marge Piercy

(The artist of the amazing "Goldenrod" painting posted above can be found frolicking in the Etsy community: https://www.etsy.com/listing/83386908/oil-painting-goldenrod-flower-painting )

Day 1: That the Science of Cartography is Limited

That the Science of Cartography Is Limited

—and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.Look down you said: this was once a famine road.I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.

-Eavan Boland


**Celebrating National Poetry Month with a new poem each day in April**

This Just In: You Don’t Have to Finish Every Book: A Tiny List of Popular Books I Couldn’t Finish (And Don’t Feel the Least Bit Bad About)

Until recently, I was self-conscious about not finishing books. I beat myself up pretty badly if I couldn’t finish a book. I mean an all-out mental slugfest. Picture Jim Carrey in “Liar, Liar,” splayed about in the bathroom stall with his head being repeatedly smashed—by his own hands—between the toilet base and the toilet seat yelling, “I’m kicking my own ass! Do you mind?!” to a poor old man who had asked him what he was doing. People have layers of interesting bookshelves on Goodreads. I have always longed to have a “Books I Couldn’t Finish” shelf but have always been embarrassed to create such a controversial shelf. After all, there are those who believe that one of the cardinal sins is not reading a book all the way through. I used to be one of them. The external naysayers all asked, “Well, how do you REALLY know you don’t like it if you don’t finish it?” My answer to that question is that if I’m still miserable about halfway through or if my interest is not piqued by the end of the first quarter then chances are it never will be. I believe that reading should be enjoyable not something you have to force yourself to slog through. After receiving that revelation, I am no longer ashamed. Proudly, I present to you a tiny list of books I couldn’t finish…

• Hunger Games
o This book has all of the makings of a bestselling phenomenon turned major motion picture trilogy and a half. Wait a minute…it is. While I usually find that I am allergic to the hype that some novels have piggybacking on their spines, the premise of this title sparked my curiosity. That spark faded approximately one quarter of the way into this book and I was left disappointed and feeling very, “meh.”

• Gone Girl
o Oh, hey, here’s another book shining brightly in the spotlight at the end of the long red carpet of hype. The cringing began with the first sentence, “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.” Say what now?

• Wuthering Heights
o This one is the most disappointing one of all. Not in content—well, sort of—but rather disappointment in myself for not being able to get past the first few chapters. A classic. I know. Believe me I really tried! I have attempted to read this four times and find myself unable to read further in roughly the same vicinity in the book each and every time. I know there are readers out there who LOVE this book and read it every year. I want to be that person. As of yet, I am not. But, having said that, because it is a classic, I will certainly try to give this one yet another whirl. Maybe.

• Fifty Shades of Grey
o Seriously? Please.