September 25, 2024 Poetry Safe camp By Sara Gilmore Photograph courtesy of the author. I was still but tried, in a burst it’s all lit up by. In the quiet permission I took my unit of heart and wondered if it was enough. Can’t in cannot, the backwater was canceled So a quiet commercial Could play inside instead. An artifact Gathered and became immobile, and even so Changed year to year until its recognition fell to wind itself. I felt myself. I felt myself inhabiting it so I felt myself. In everything To see a circular tape, again and Again I see it, determining the summer was suddenness Netting how images can melt, can melt the video lengthening some dream Because exhaust is unmanageable and so released. I push in the tape, Iridescent and wet. I’m soggy and failing at no end in sight And just figures on their way, where are they going, What is their position. Let me place you inside the deer To keep you warm. You can read two more poems by Sara Gilmore, “Mad as only an angel can be” and “Knowing constraint” in the new Fall issue of The Paris Review, no. 249. You can also read Gilmore’s thoughts on writing “Safe camp” here on the Daily. Sara Gilmore is a poet and translator. She teaches at the University of Iowa and works as a phlebotomist.
March 23, 2022 Poetry Remembrance Day By Spencer Matheson Illustration by Alex Merto. Spencer Matheson is a novelist and poet. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions. He lives in Paris, and teaches at the École normale supérieure.
March 4, 2022 Poetry The One Who Happened By Xi Chuan Illustration by Thomas Colligan. He happened to hear the world was square, like the square table at home that could be used for eating or playing cards on. He happened to hear that the emperor is made so by divine right, but he was just a commoner so that’s nothing. He happened to have not heard of Hitler; that guy with a little mustache avoided him for nineteen years. He happened to have not heard of the Cultural Revolution, and looked at himself in the mirror in a positive light. Read More
December 15, 2021 Poetry Two Poems By Kathleen Ossip Illustration by Anna Bak-Kvapil Henry Hudson Wood is a masculine substance. Witness the Arts and Crafts movement, the men at the helm of it. Witness, for that matter, this room: Oak floor, oak walls, oaken ceiling. The air-conditioning grate ersatz oak. The slats of the ceiling fan oak veneer. The table I write on, particleboard with no pretense to oak, oak’s sad cousin. And the craftsman-style light fixtures, triangles, right angles, dreamed up in the minds of geometers. What does geometry illuminate? I’m the sad cousin of a mind. Read More
December 9, 2021 Poetry Two Self-Portraits By Tove Ditlevsen Illustration by Na Kim Self-Portrait 1 I cannot: cook pull off a hat entertain wear jewelry arrange flowers remember appointments send thank-you cards leave the right tip keep a man feign interest at parent-teacher conferences. I cannot stop: smoking drinking eating chocolate stealing umbrellas oversleeping forgetting to remember birthdays and to clean my nails. Telling people what they want to hear spilling secrets loving strange places and psychopaths. I can: be alone do the dishes read books form sentences listen and be happy without feeling guilty. Read More
March 21, 2017 Poetry Now By Frederick Seidel Photo: Arun Kulshreshtha For Robert Silvers And you could say we’ve been living in clover From Walt Whitman to Barack Obama. Now a dictatorship of vicious spineless slimes We the people voted in has taken over. Once we’d abolished slavery, we lived in clover, From sea to shining sea, even in terrible times. It’s over. Read More