Poem of the Day
The People’s History of 1998
By Gbenga Adesina
The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve / and wanted vengeance.
The Yangtze River in China lost its nerve / and wanted vengeance.
Could you not look after me another day?
Why did you go alone? I leave in only another day.
If your gravestone is not erased first my head will be.
The first time I met Wittgenstein, I was
late. “The traffic was murder,” I explained.
He spent the next forty-five minutes
The first poem came at an iron glass-topped table
about the space heater near my feet how my ears fuzzed
from its warmth and maybe something else its coils
I can hear him not wanting to die with fiberoptic
clarity. The gun in his lap has other
thoughts but won't get on the phone. This
Quarter in hand to see "Raising the Dead"—
But they forget everything, the dead.
Have you ever dreamed you had sex with someone
you aren't remotely interested in,
like a guy you work with or one of your husband's friends,
He gazed into the air, searching for a word in my language.
I blinked. Across the pool a zephyr stirred, in my language.
Where was I? Where was he? Where he looked, remembering?
The branches shake, Jimmy, it rains in that trance;
Tuxedo in the colonnades asks after your breakfast.
A fire rises and falls in the house of Cadmus
Cut it way back.
Do not be afraid to pinch the first,
the only blossom. The berry cannot thrive
Undone. Only a head, a fine
cheek and throat his chisel cut
from white. She waits to become a thought,