each night a diluted memory infiltrates my dreams—you catapult me to heaven on the slat of a swing, shine my wrists with oil from the oranges in mum’s garden, soothe every sulk with the best words, the laughter that defines your face—i don’t recall your face, i try to remember but i only see myself stretched out on a rickety bunk bed in a boarding school dorm watching naked wires flirt with a broken fan on the soot coated ceiling when they told me,
"There are a lot of things I don’t remember—important but non-consequential things. This poem was an attempt to hone in on specific memories, let go of the pressure to get the facts right and surrender to the truth of the emotion I still hold close."
October 5th at 7pm, during Fall for the Book, we will feature a reading by four of our Editorial Board members, Peter Streckfus, Vivek Narayanan, Carmen Giménez Smith, and Sandra Lim.
"Brief though it was, Alice Moore’s marriage to Paul Dunbar has tended to overshadow her achievements as a writer, even though she outlived him by three decades and married twice more....Highly educated, with a strong belief in her own talent and determination to make her own living, Dunbar-Nelson was a New Woman, that protofeminist figure who dominated American culture at the turn of the twentieth century."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
“For me, Virgil’s Aeneid is partly about continuity and repetition, a setting out over and over again. Likewise, David Ferry’s deep intertextual approach to writing—especially in Bewilderment, which includes his translations of Virgil, Catullus, and others, alongside his original poems—is also about continuity and iteration."
