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Anna Journey
I would’ve stabbed the man’s hand
had he not jerked it away—this is what I usually say
toward the end of the story. The man

had pried back the right vinyl side panel
of my living-room window’s A.C. unit, ripped
the accordion-style flap from its mounting track,
and began palming the wall inside
my first-floor apartment. My ex

had left at the beginning of summer and Natalia
wouldn’t move in until spring, so I lived alone
that June in Richmond, in the back bottom suite
of a shoebox-shaped fourplex
set perpendicular to the street. In the story

I’ve told for almost twenty years,
I’m a junior in college toweling my wet hair
as I walk from my bathroom through the hall,
headed to my bedroom, at two in the morning.
I notice a flicker of motion from the living-

room window: a human hand
flopping, like live tilapia, through
the side panel’s bent vinyl, the limb shoved in
up to the elbow. I charge at the arm, yell,

I see you, motherfucker, and the hand
jerks back. The man flees. When I call 911
and reach, incredibly, a busy signal, I phone Ed instead,
who will drive over, remove his old A.C. unit, take it
to his new place. Until Ed arrives, I hover
near the pried-back vinyl

gripping a butcher knife. I would’ve stabbed
the hand that tried to steal my A.C. This is how
I tell it: I once thwarted a thief and he’s lucky
I let him keep all his fingers. Last night,

on the phone with my best friend, I retold
the story and Alicia paused, then said,
He wasn’t after your A.C. Twenty years ago,
she must’ve said the exact same thing to me,
but I’d brushed it off, positive

I’d terrified a thief. It was June in Richmond
and I was young and held an unconditional belief
in a heat made utterly obscene
from humidity. It got so hot I could imagine
someone getting high and thinking, Goddamn,
I need some A.C. My living-room window faced

a small side lawn that abutted the back garden
of a rich person’s town house: a low wall
of calico brick from the nineteenth century
with an overhanging fringe of dogwoods that had
by that point in summer expanded into a fat

green canopy. At two in the morning
no one would’ve seen him climb in—quick
flicker between the brick and my window.
I know years ago Alicia said the same thing,

but I had to stop believing in my own
permanence to hear her. But I still
believe in—deep summer, Virginia—
that heat.
from the book THE JUDAS EAR / Louisiana State University Press
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“Unconditional Belief in Heat” draws on an (unfortunately) autobiographical experience I had as an undergraduate student, in Richmond, Virginia. Alone in my apartment late one night, I noticed that someone had pried loose the right vinyl side panel of my living-room window’s A.C. unit. A man had shoved his arm inside and started feeling around the wall. For years, I told the same story, emphasizing my bravura (“I see you, motherfucker”) and knife-wielding badassery. It was a bragging-rights anecdote, for sure, inflected with equal parts naivete and denial. At 21, who really believes in their own mortality? My story ignored—or couldn’t yet see—the deeper threat. In “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” from his poetry collection, "Winter Stars," Larry Levis enacts, with a wry candor, the ways in which one becomes a different person over time. “I know this isn’t much,” Levis writes, “But I wanted to  explain this life to you, even if / I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.” With maturity and experience, Levis suggests, comes an enlarged sense of our own fallibility as well as the insight with which to tell the more difficult story.

Anna Journey on "Unconditional Belief in Heat"
Color photograph of America's iconic yellow school bus
Poet Diane Seuss Pens Protest to Local School Board

In a letter to the Brandywine Public Schools Board of Education, the Pulitzer Prize winner wrote, "I urge the school board to think long and hard before turning Brandywine into a school system without freedom of thought and freedom of expression. You risk alienating hard-working professionals who are, in fact, experts in their fields. You risk shutting down the imaginations and intellectual adventurousness of the students. A surefire way to turn off students to their own educations is to control them into submission."

via THE WASHINGTON POST
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Cover image of "Poetics for the More-Than-Human World," in which Lesley Battler's poem, "redundant," appears
What Sparks Poetry:
Lesley Battler on "redundant"

"I chose to feature 'redundant' as this is one of my first poems written as the pandemic started to unfold. It marks a shift in my work, from a focus on resource industry capitalism to a more interior world, mapping the psychological dissonance caused by the virus along with the greater issue of climate change. In this poem, and in all my post-COVID writing, I have continued working with found texts and I think this poem’s language and boxed-in structure reflect a sense of diminishment and claustrophobia."
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Write with Poetry Daily
 
This April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, we'll share popular writing prompts from our "What Sparks Poetry" essay series each morning. Write along with us!

My first concert was the 1986 Raising Hell Tour. I was fourteen and the headliners were Run DMC, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Whodini, and Timex Social Club. At the time, it didn’t feel particularly historic. My mother dropped me off at the Long Beach Arena with my two younger cousins, Kenny and Ryan. Midway through Whodini’s performance a riot broke out. Thinking back, riots bookend my adolescence, but that’s another story.

What’s your Woodstock? Write a poem from the point of view of someone behind the scenes of a concert or a public event, not a performer or fan. Who’s working security? Think of a custodial worker, the stage crew, or someone at the concessions stand, the people responsible for the quality of your experience. Offer them a song!
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