Poem of the Day: Nancy Botkin

  SKATES   In childhood you unfold the map of the world and smooth it out with your small hand, and with one finger trace a path somewhere not very far, usually a block or two from home where the pond is frozen over, where the trees sag a little from the...

Poem of the Day: Mary Ruefle

  SAGA   Everything that ever happened to me is just hanging—crushed and sparkling—in the air, waiting to happen to you. Everything that ever happened to me happened to somebody else first. I would give you an example but they are all invisible....

Poem of the Day: Jean Valentine

  YOU DREW MY HEAD   You drew my head the back of my head my neck stem you made my head a charcoal skull and even the skull is turned away no eyes   —from Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain: New and Collection Poems, 1965 – 2003,...

Poem of the Day: Elizabeth Bishop

  THE BIGHT   At low tide like this how sheer the water is. White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches. Absorbing, rather than being absorbed, the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything, the...

Poem of the Day: Erica Bernheim

  VIRGIL MOON   I’m willing to bet that greasy twenty stuck to the bottom of your empty file cabinet, it’s never me you think of when you try to shoot yourself onto the ceilings of your apartment. Your thoughts lie somewhere in the sink you call...

Poem of the Day: David Dodd Lee

  A POEM ABOUT BLUEGILLS   There are poems about bluegills. There are poems about trout. The bluegill doesn’t give a shit. It’ll eat a bare hook but would rather not hear about your childhood. The bluegill’s thick headed. It hunkers down in the weeds,...