Morri Creech
I am tired of having a name.
Every time I wake
it grinds its teeth
like the gears of a moving van,
and it smells of soot,
like the sweat of being a man,
and it weighs like a stone
I carry for no one's sake.

In the courthouse it echoes
down the long corridors,
and it creaks in the bedsprings
of cheap rooms, and it croons in bars;
it whistles up to the gaps
between the stars
and down to the truck stop
bathroom's piss-stained floors.

I have betrayed it to the dark
when there was no one to blame
and whispered it seductively
into the ear of danger.
But I am tired, and I want
to be done with it for good.

I will give it up. I will answer
to nothing. I will be
a stranger. I will put on the silence
like an executioner's hood.
Here it is, poor neck
squirming on the block: my name.
from the book THE SENTENCE / Louisiana State University Press 
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
Color portrait of Lord Byron, chin in hand, within a decorative frame
Byron: a God in Greece

"Unique among the philhellenes who aided in the struggle for Greek independence, Byron even has a public ­statue in Athens in his honour: a bare-chested female personification of Greece, crowning the poet with a palm branch. All are reminders of the unalloyed admiration in which he was and is held in Greece—where he died 200 years ago, in April 1824—in contrast to the Anglophone world, where his reception has ever been more uneven and 'complicated.'"

via THE TELEGRAPH
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover image in black and white of Evelyn Reilly's book, Having Broken, Are
What Sparks Poetry:
Evelyn Reilly on "Having Broken, Are"

"I live in New York City and also down a dirt road in the country, and that dual existence is part of the 'reality' of both the title poem and the poem sequences that make up most of this book. I put 'reality' in quotation marks because all poems, I believe, are attempts to channel what Sun RA (who is also an interlocutor in this book) calls the 'impossible possible,' which is both a reality and not. Seeking possible words for impossible possibilities I take as one of poetry’s tasks."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
donate
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. 
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2024 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency