Hattie's Favorite Poems
Well – selected favorites.
Hi! The newsletter is on “spring break” to prep for National Poetry Writing Month. Please expect super-brief emails all week.
I keep a document on my computer with my all-time favorite poems in it. You’ve seen a couple of my favorites in previous newsletters – revisit Love Poem or What Carries Us in prior emails – but I wanted to share some more with you.
Here’s a selection of other poems from that document.
Update on Mary
Mary Szybist
Mary always thinks that as soon as she gets a few more things done and finishes the dishes, she will open herself to God.
At the gym Mary watches shows about how she should dress herself, so each morning she tries on several combinations of skirts and heels before retreating to her waterproof boots. This takes a long time, so Mary is busy.
Mary can often be observed folding the laundry or watering the plants. It is only when she has a simple, repetitive task that her life feels orderly, and she feels that she is not going to die before she is supposed to die.
Mary wonders if she would be a better person if she did not buy so many almond cookies and pink macaroons.
When people say “Mary,” Mary still thinks Holy Virgin! Holy Heavenly Mother! But Mary knows she is not any of those things.
Mary worries about not having enough words in her head.
Mary fills her cupboards with many kinds of teas so that she can select from their pastel labels according to her mood: Tuscan Pear, Earl Grey Lavender, Cherry Rose Green. But Mary likes only plain red tea and drinks it from morning to night.
Mary has too many silver earrings and likes to sort them in the compartments of her drawer.
Someday Mary would like to think about herself, but she’s not yet sure what it means to think, and she’s even more confused about herself.
It is not uncommon to see Mary falling asleep on her yoga mat when she has barely begun to stretch.
Mary sometimes closes her eyes and tries to imagine herself as a door swung open. But it is easier to imagine pink macaroons—
Mary likes the solemn titles on her husband’s thick books. She feels content and sleepy when he reads them beside her at night—The Works of Saint Augustine, Critique of Judgment, Paradigm of Change in Theology—but she does not want to read them.
Mary secretly thinks she is pretty and therefore deserves to be loved.
Mary tells herself that if only she could have a child she could carry around like an extra lung, the emptiness inside her would stop gnawing.
It’s hard to tell if she believes this.
Mary believes she is a sincere and serious person, but she does not even try to pray.
Some afternoons Mary pretends to read a book, but mostly she watches the patterns of sunlight through the curtains.
On those afternoons, she’s like a child who has run out of things to think about.
Mary likes to go out and sit in the yard. If she let herself, she’d stare at the sky all day.
The most interesting things to her are clouds. See, she watches them even by moonlight. Tonight, until bedtime, we can let her have those.
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
Howard Nemerov
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
Wild
Marlon Hacla | Translated by Kristine Ong Muslim
All those touched and killed by the night end up floating on sea. Strewn across some other beaches are the stranded bodies of dead kings. The deluge wants to say that it does not speak the language of destruction but of music. Exiting a classroom, your body finds itself walking towards a place, where traps bloom and mutiny waits, and then stops there. Give me a hundred reasons to look for you again.
This next one is longer – it has an audio recording and a video if you’d like to listen!
City Streets
Ellyn Maybe
City streets
She hates the street
It looks like it was beautiful once
But it’s seen one too many tiretracks.
She thinks of the small city where she comes from.
Images flash in her mind of ice cream sodas
And the pet store where she bought the turtle she told her secrets.
She grew up in a family of broken plates and smashed records,
Endearments that got caught in the throat like words serving a life sentence.
She saw her parents like an apple married to an onion:
One made her cry if she peeled the layers.
The name she was called, the friend she thought she’d know forever,
Walking away in their peer pressure dance.
She was a girl wearing her heart on her sleeve,
On her hair,
on every nook and cranny.
She was the one people laughed at,
Like she was Chaplin,
Like there were silent movies on her body,
Like she was a projector, the camera,
Like she was popcorn.
She is Harold Lloyd sometimes,
Hanging from the clock,
Counting the minutes til she sleeps.
She dreams in psychedelic colors, fuchsia and periwinkle.
When she sleeps, the voices stop,
Her voices are loud today
It’s the You’re Not Normal alto,
blended with the You’ll Never Find Love baritone
This is her morning coffee.
This is what wakes her up.
Today might be different!
She whispers words of encouragement, but
Because her ear is bruised from this lifetime
Instead of hearing love, she hears ‘of”
And instead of hope, it’s ‘nope’
This girl looks at her finger.
There was a diamond!
She got it when she was six,
Her grandma said no matter what the world thought,
She deserved beautiful things.
Someone yelled “hey baby!”
It momentarily distracted her
From the symphony of lonely conductors
Playing in her brain.
Imagine hearing Roy Orbison
And Leonard Cohen 24/7
Sometimes she needed Barry Manilow,
ABBA, the Go Gos,
She hears other songs when she walks
With her best friend
Peggy Lee,
The Supremes and B-52s
Her best friend’s a line where she is a circle
When asked where she’s going, she says the library
Her friend smirks and says you need to get out more
Books can’t give you an orgasm
She responds you aren’t pressing right then
Books have a double life
Just like readers
The conversation she has with books is better
She would rather spend the night with Henry Miller
And doesn’t fully trust anyone
Who says they wouldn’t.
She looks down at the street,
There is a slight wind now,
The birds are circling in the wing dance
She watches the old people hunched over their newspapers,
Looking to see if their mahjong partners and ballroom dance rodeos
Are still breathing
Seeing which politicians are screwing someone over
This generation
The young people are kissing each other,
Their faces are full of ice cream and calm
She passes a mirror and gives it the finger
Her face doesn’t look like that!
She resented it.
Her face looks like a stop sign,
And a train that won’t slow down.
Her ass was part caboose
She ran on steam.
She was a porter with luggage on her back!
She was nearly forty
she looked younger
That was the strangest thing
She could pass for thirty
Maybe even twenty-five,
But she couldn’t pass for happy.
Suddenly a man shouted
“Hey, Mars girl! Get off the Earth.”
She turned herself in to mask the scream.
It was routine for her
Routine and a gift
A gift and a curse
Yesterday she was a bed
In Van Gogh’s room at Arles
She let him rest his psyche in her sheets
She was a pillow that knew all his strokes,
She gave herself to every color
She was a piece of charcoal and knew
the morning he shot himself she would fly away
she flew above the street like Chagall now
she saw the people becoming tiny
their voices like sandpaper for so many years from now
barely a murmur
she saw her ring, it slipped off,
but oh, how she dazzled.
Poem Number Two on Bell’s Theorem, or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love
June Jordan
There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.