Gratitude: November 22, 2025

The Sun, Mad Envious, Just Wants the Moon

out of the way. It knows that I tend to cling

to potential in the dark, that I am myself only

as I am beguiled by the moon’s lunatic luster,

when the streets are so bare they grow voices.

The sun has lost patience with my craving

for the night’s mass-produced romance, that

dog-eared story where every angle is exquisite,

and ghostly suitors, their sleek smells exploding,

queue up to ravish my waning. Bursting with

bluster, the sun backslaps the moon to reveal

me, splintered, kissing the boulevard face first,

clutching change for a jukebox that long ago

lost its hunger for quarters. It wounds the sun

to know how utterly I have slipped its gilded

clutch to become its most mapless lost cause.

Her eye bulging, she besieges me with bright.

So I remind her that everything dies. All the

brilliant bitch can do for me then is spit light

on the path while I search for a place to sleep.

Patricia Smith

🪷

Medusa 

Poseidon was easier than most.
He calls himself a god,
but he fell beneath my fingers
with more shaking than any mortal.
He wept when my robe fell from my shoulders.

I made him bend his back for me,
listened to his screams break like waves.
We defiled that temple the way it should be defiled,
screaming and bucking our way from corner to corner.
The bitch goddess probably got a real kick out of that.
I'm sure I'll be hearing from her.

She'll give me nightmares for a week or so;
that I can handle.
Or she'll turn the water in my well into blood;
I'll scream when I see it,
and that will be that.
Maybe my first child 
will be born with the head of a fish.
I'm not even sure it was worth it,
Poseidon pounding away at me, a madman,
losing his immortal mind
because of the way my copper skin swells in moonlight.

Now my arms smoke and itch.
Hard scales cover my wrists like armour.
C'mon Athena, he was only another lay,
and not a particularly good one at that,
even though he can spit steam from his fingers.
Won't touch him again. Promise.
And we didn't mean to drop to our knees
in your temple,
but our bodies were so hot and misaligned.
It's not every day a gal gets to sample a god,
you know that. Why are you being so rough on me?

I feel my eyes twisting,
the lids crusting over and boiling,
the pupils glowing red with heat.
Athena, woman to woman,
could you have resisted him?
Would you have been able to wait
for the proper place, the right moment,
to jump those immortal bones?

Now my feet are tangled with hair,
my ears are gone. My back is curving
and my lips have grown numb.
My garden boy just shattered at my feet.

Dammit, Athena,
take away my father's gold.
Send me away to live with lepers.
Give me a pimple or two.
But my face. To have men never again
be able to gaze at my face,
growing stupid in anticipation
of that first touch,
how can any woman live like that?
How will I be able 
to watch their warm bodies turn to rock
when their only sin was desiring me?

All they want is to see me sweat.
They only want to touch my face
and run their fingers through my . . .

my hair

is it moving?

Patricia Smith

Gratitude: November 18, 2025

Mottled Tuesday

Something was about to go laughably wrong,

whether directly at home or here,

on this random shoal pleading with its eyes

till it too breaks loose, caught in a hail of references.

I’ll add one more scoop

to the pile of retail.

Hey, you’re doing it, like I didn’t tell you

to, my sinking laundry boat, point of departure,

my white pomegranate, my swizzle stick.

We’re leaving again of our own volition

for bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,

maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us

for a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and

forget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this

fertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.

Here’s hoping the referral goes tidily, O brother.

Chime authoritatively with the pop-ups and extras.

Keep your units pliable and folded,

the recourse a mere specter, like you have it coming to you,

awash with the new day and its abominable antithesis,

OK? Don’t be able to make that distinction.

John Ashbery

Gratitude: November 15, 2025

Instead of Depression

try calling it hibernation.
Imagine the darkness is a cave
in which you will be nurtured
by doing absolutely nothing.
Hibernating animals don’t even dream.
It’s okay if you can’t imagine
Spring. Sleep through the alarm
of the world. Name your hopelessness
a quiet hollow, a place you go
to heal, a den you dug,
Sweetheart, instead
of a grave.

Andrea Gibson

Gratitude: November 11, 2025

That’s My Heart Right There

We used to say,

That’s my heart right there.

As if to say,

Don’t mess with her right there.

As if, don’t even play,

That’s a part of me right there.

In other words, okay okay,

That’s the start of me right there.

As if, come that day,

That’s the end of me right there.

As if, push come to shove,

I would fend for her right there.

As if, come what may,

I would lie for her right there.

As if, come love to pay,

I would die for that right there.

Willie Perdomo

Gratitude: November 3, 2025

To Be Held

Linda Hogan

To be held

by the light

was what I wanted,

to be a tree drinking the rain,

no longer parched in this hot land.

To be roots in a tunnel growing

but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves

and the green slide of mineral

down the immense distances

into infinite comfort

and the land here, only clay,

still contains and consumes

the thirsty need

the way a tree always shelters the unborn life

waiting for the healing

after the storm

which has been our life.

Gratitude: November 1, 2025

My Love You Died in My Dream Last Night

I did not know it was possible (your constancy

being among your chief characteristics)

and I, bereft, could not think of how to tell our child

and so kindly you got up and together we admired

the suit in which you chose to be buried

and your ongoing good humor.

I thought it would not last long, your ability

to continue talking with a body going soft

and tried to limit my conversation so as to have you

a few more hours, but also was buzzing with questions

of what I was now to do without you, questions

I could ask no one else—what do they know—

and when at last you admitted your need

to lay yourself  back down in the coffin

I cut a square of  light from my throat

and when you closed your eyes I buried it with you.

Heather Christie

❤️

Grief

Grief—as I knew it, died many times. It

died trying to reunite with other lesser

deaths. Each morning I lay out my

children’s clothing to cover their grief.

The grief remains but is changed by

what it is covered with. A picture of

oblivion is not the same as oblivion.

My grief is not the same as my pain. My

mother was a mathematician so I tried

to calculate my grief. My father was an

engineer so I tried to build a box around

my grief, along with a small wooden

bed that grief could lie down on. The

texts kept interrupting my grief, forcing

me to speak about nothing. If you cut

out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky,

no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it

with a blue frame, place it faceup on

the floor of an empty museum with an

open atrium to the sky, that is grief.

Victoria Chang

 

Gratitude: October 31, 2025

Calling Things What They Are 

I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was young and heading to the Cape with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean.Tufted titmouse! I yell, and Lucas laughs and says, Thought so. But he is humoring me; he didn’t think so at all. My father does this same thing. Shouts out at the feeder announcing the party attendees. He throws out a whole peanut or two to the Stellar’s jay who visits on a low oak branch in the morning. To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain. 

Ada Limon