As always, click on the titles to see more about each poet, and why she wrote her work posted here.

1951, Brenda Hillman 1951 –

Was it odd to be born?

Was it odd to be born 
when women wore rick-rack

& the sun was a bracelet of yes? 
  
When wind bent dandelions in puffy winglets, 
& wisdom did raise her voice & not say weed &

when the toad did raise its spikes at the same time 
                 as federal codes 
                      & the try-to-be-perfect raised its voice?

Did the clang of copper collectors & the too-many lawns 
                 begin in Arizona
 
while peel-paint steeples rose over dirt for the prism 
                                  of progress, 
            
                 minerals torn from mines with no mouths
but you had a mouth & sang early?

When nuclear testing began north of love
& the Remington computer was placed in office use,

when there was just as much beauty & sex as later,
while some lay down at drive-ins in Chevies on seats
                        the color of crushed 
                 berries & phone calls went up to a dime?

When Congress loaned money to countries because their grains had 
ancient fungus claviceps purpuria that caused 
          visions & swelling 
under the silent claw of the predator?

Was shame in you born before beauty? 
Was beauty was shame was beauty?

As white gravel spread under the white churches 
as silver sequins on danceless 
dresses tacked on each
                  “hanging by a thread”

                         like drops of sweat on horses at the city’s edge

while downcast daisies were mimicked on sisterly aprons 
       catching sugars from women making pudding from boxes 
                                  under swamp coolers

 with slightly mildewy pads in a breeze 
                      created for doing housework by yourself? 
  
Was it odd to be born when two 
types of purslane in the west were called weed, 
even agave used to make soap, 
though it was home to the yucca moth, central & sweet, its

terminal clusters piercing thunderheads over red pick-up trucks,

& lowly dogbane hiding from developers with sibling roots 
     of fungi with  “no downsides to pesticides”
                & florets like diamond periods on certain fonts           
                                                  also were called weed?

Was it odd to be born near hillsides with radars
         like baby ears of question marks 
                        
     under the silent claw of the predator,   
when mountains shook toward sabino canyons

& there was Jello salad at picnics?

Here from this century can you say
                 was it wild to be born?

Was there anything else like this, anything at all?

Copyright © 2025 by Brenda Hillman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 27, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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Failed Poems, Jessica Abughattas

will crawl out of the drain and try to kill you
like some 80s horror flick. The picture of us at the Santa Fe 
Railyard, foreheads glistening. The black widow creeping
from the mound of linens still warm from our bodies. Mechanical
hum of crickets when you push into me in the middle of the night, when 
I can’t sleep and the years replay like a foreign movie, a terrible one 
where the voices sound underwater. Failed poems will steal 
your breath when you wake parched, hungover, emptied
in a room full of the steady buzz of the refrigerator. 
When all that excites you is momentary, an earthquake in which 
all the books shake in place, and nothing falls. No one ever reads 
failed poems, but they follow you home in the dark and tuck in 
beside you. Failed poems are cute grim reapers that live in cartoon snowcaps. 
They’re midnight döner kebabs that give you heartburn. 
Once, in Zurich, we were served rabbit paella at a party 
celebrating an exhibition of an artist from Venice Beach 
who used to be homeless but drinks $25 Erewhon smoothies and paints 
hundreds maybe thousands of happy faces with his feet. His canvasses 
go for $25,000. Toe paintings are better or at least significantly 
more profitable than failed poems. Failed poems won’t help you 
earn a living. You will probably have to do freelance marketing 
to sustain the creation of failed poems. Failed poems accrue interest. 
They seep into dreams where all your friends line up to blow 
your husband. They cost a monthly cloud subscription to maintain. 
Failed poems are injected into your father’s veins when he ODs 
for the second time this year. They’re shared to infinity 
when you’re canceled for fringe political views. When you’re six
feet under, a failed poem is written on your head. It’s a prayer 
in the form of a failed poem, the last words 
you hear on earth

Copyright © 2025 by Jessica Abughattas. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 28, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.