☀ Today's Poem: "Work" Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Today's Headline: Sarah Lyn Rogers on the Speaker as Mask in Verse

February 26, 2025 Work Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon I know not how to make a bowl of clay, much less a woman made of flesh. Makeup I learned by watching, trial and error. I put on, my face a process, pounce, brush, sweep, line and look, how powdered I may move, brown and black. And black bow deeply, serving now my only audience whose excellence gives blackness back for which I weep and will bow deeper still and cry. I'm made, feel praiseworthy, fearfully. How stuffed with joy I've been, how overfull. Dusted. The children say I'm dead. They laugh, not killing themselves. I laugh. Don't say you're killing me. Destroyers suffer. Mockery kills, fills pockets. Empties mouths. Dumb. Don't eat the dust. Caking my sponges daily, dallied, how long have I been here? Who can believe this is my job? This is the job, I recognize when surfacing. Doubt, destroyed. What work is good? Thorough winter's blasting melts, unburying the deck, then freezes to make steps treacherous. One sunny day erases all evidence. I make my way to church. To face what grace, what God might see, what breathes, shapes, sparks beyond the musty theatre. (I smashed a bowl I loved. I raised a rock above my head and brought it down until the piece I'd loved was shards, until I broke the rock I'd weaponized. I wandered later through the makeup aisle, then out to face my loss. There was a child, twirling blithely through the parking lot. She spun so close, her serene smile right under my nose, her face my broken- hearted conviction. I still want to make something of ] myself [ from the book PURCHASE / University of Pittsburgh Press READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward Whatever you’re doing is the work. I tell my students often, hoping they learn trust, “making their way” through poetry. In “Work,” recalling a moment I felt so terrified, I destroyed a bowl I loved, I’m learning how I might belong. In comma and question mark, apostrophe, period, parenthesis and bracket, who are you loving when you write? Feeling heartbroken, where do you hide from your mistakes? In plain sight? Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon on "Work" "Sarah Lyn Rogers on the Speaker as Mask in Verse" "Poetry is a trickster of a genre: not fiction, not nonfiction, but also not not them: both/and, either/or. Likely predating the written word, poetry in ancient times saved and circulated information worth remembering, facts and fictions: history, genealogy, myths, legends, declarations of love. Somewhere along the line, the concept of 'the speaker' emerged—a hybrid of nonfiction’s rule that the narrator is the author, and fiction’s rule that the narrator is not the author but an imagined character." viaLITERARY HUB READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES What Sparks Poetry: Matthew Cooperman on Reading Prose "How will we spend our days? How will we attend to our rapidly accelerating planet? One habit of response is to read bracing prose, and for me, it’s often “the consolations of philosophy,” to quote an excellent recent example by Alain de Botton. From the Affective Turn to the Queering of Nature, Object Oriented Ontology to Anthropocene Studies, there’s an incredible florescence of philosophical writing going on internationally, as if climate change has triggered all our cells to wake up." 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. © 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency

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