Correction: This morning's email, which featured Allison Adair's "Ways to Describe a Death Inside Your Own Living Body," included a misprint.   See the corrected poem below. 
Allison Adair
If wavy glass feels old to you then sit down. I’m speaking
from inside the lead curve, where black minerals burn

to a shine like pissed-off soot suns. I was sure it was
a boy. I thought I knew the sound of darkness,

the slow leather collapse of a bat’s wing
folding into itself, the swollen fucking of a cloud

of them wrestling for space on the cave’s drapery—
let’s call it what it is because that’s how death begins, by tricking

your body into an arch, as if life will just tie a string to your spine
and hang there, a patient pendulum bob, waiting for you to finish.

No, inside the glass we see death clearly. First you feel limbs
(which, people remind you, you only ever imagined), then vague

flinting in the damp then the suck of wet bread separating
from its crust, then the white gloves around you flip inside

out and move on with the bright day
then you are far away

the deep cave you visited once, hollow, the planet’s stone

core as it tries to carve out one secret place and fails.

You wait for a soft mouse above to spill out

of its hole, for the bats under your ribs

to flap toward some smaller pulse,

for the sun to give in, as it does,

so that the last headlamp can

finally click off and head

back into the night

everybody knows.
from the book THE CLEARING / Milkweed Editions
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"After Rubén, With Kinship"

In a wide-ranging interview, Francisco Aragón counsels young Latinx poets introducing writers unfamiliar to American audiences, "to thoroughly document and internalize the context of the work and period of the subject or figure you want to bring to a U.S. audience. It will make for a more enriching experience and nourish you as an artist."
 
via LATINO STORIES
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artEquity: "artEquity offers training and consulting services to individuals and organizations on creating and sustaining a culture of equity and inclusion through the arts and culture."

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What Sparks Poetry:
Jennifer Chang on "The World"

"For days I could go nowhere. The temperature dwelled stubbornly below freezing. The roads were too slick to walk on. My car was encased in ice, a solid blue cube, and, quite comically, a red bicycle, leaning against a nearby shed, seemed to be waiting for me. I sat at the window, wearing two sweaters, looking at it."
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