you’re home. eating lentils. talking to your loved one. you’re abroad. eating lentils. talking to your loved one. you’re not yourself. you’ve been stolen. you’re talking to your lentils. you’re not a knife, not cotton. talking to your loved one. you forgot how to talk and forgot how to hang in the closet. you forgot the letter p in the receit. you’re talking to cotton. it doesn’t answer. its life was not for you. a lot. too much. although there is never too much. you’re anywhere. eating lentils. talking to. she doesn’t answer. she went everywhere you went. she flew. when you fly—you can’t cry. you’re talking to her. she doesn’t answer. but there were two rooms. you didn’t know where. you went anywhere. no one was drawing your loved one there. just a manuscript in the bottom drawer of the desk. and its feathers are petrified. along with two dozen of its vertebrae. you told your loved one about this. you ate lentils and it didn’t even rain. one hundred fifty million years—just the blink of an eye. in your manuscript. in the solnhofen schist.
One Morning
don’t read this text who knows what it will open or close in you so read what until now for so many years you read that will preserve you don’t believe that which is impossible to believe and which is like the poison in bona sforza’s ring or like unexplored and never-to-be-explored planets don’t believe what I am writing for our lives are too dissimilar somewhere there remains a clock connecting us but even it manages to stop for we are too fragile. don’t read this text
i am fated to bear it alone. ecce textus: one morning i left my house to wander city streets
"At the 2019 Druskininkai Poetic Fall, as Kęstutis read from a wheelchair, my English translations ghosting on a screen above, a Croatian poet turned to me and said, “This is really good. Nobody writes like this.” I thought she was right. I thought maybe Kęstutis and I are right in trying to put together an English collection of his late free-verse poems that are something like stream of consciousness and something like surrealism and not exactly either but the unique expression of a startlingly creative mind at play. I am glad they have life in them yet."
The Academy of American Poets announces the winners of the 2020 American Poets Prizes. They include Carmen Giménez Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, Geoffrey Brock, Nikky Finney, and others. The prizes support poets at all stages of their careers, ranging from poets twenty-three years old or younger to poets demonstrating, "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry."
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.
“The object I’m considering is a landscape, which includes recognizing myself as part of any landscape that I’m engaging, whether I’m looking at it, remembering it, imagining it, or writing about it, and whether that landscape is the rolling hills of California, a painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, a video by Zenib Sedira, or an argument for public parks by Fredrick Law Olmsted."
