I Love This Poem by Linda Gregg

“There She Is”

Linda Gregg knows that the worst parts of ourselves aren’t tucked away in the boxes we think they are. They stand in our gardens, growing each day, just as we do. It would be nice to know that the darkness is in the dark. But she isn’t. She is here, there she is, there is blood on her face. Petunias and snap peas and butterflies and sunshine and all the good things we thought we would harvest wind around her gnawed off limbs, her broken heart, her endless pain. These things have chosen to include her - the monarch and the flowers and the light. And so should you.

Read the poem here.

I Love This Poem by James Wright

“A Blessing”

I am sharing a spring poem in the middle of winter, in the darkest days even, because I’m pretty sure dark days are also a blessing. I’ll save you the cliches. Last night I imagined the often-imagined timeline of a man’s life - the baby crawling, the boy, the adult walking and the elder, hunched over with a cane. Then I imagined him spinning. Instead of his linear path, he pirouetted through each of his days. His whole life became a waltz. This poem is a waltz, a meadow that exists here and then gone and then again. At some point the ponies were sheltered in a barn, the grasses and trees covered in snow. This is Minnesota, after all. But then I read the poem and it is spring, there are ponies again. One day I will read it on a day that isn’t dark and life will feel congruous. At this point in the timeline of man, the ponies are gone, surely, but maybe there is something else there, just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota. Maybe the willows are still in the pasture, maybe the remnants of a rotten barbed wire fence. Or maybe there is something generational, something underground and burrowing, something waiting for its chance in the cycle to break into blossom once more.

Read the poem here.

I Love This Poem by Louise Glück

“Matins”

You want to know how I spend my time? Me too. Where does it go? How have we gotten here from there? I opened my eyes and it was just after dawn. I closed them again, the clench, the squeeze, looking for some courage to rise, and when I opened them I found it was noon. I have a bad memory. A memory like a goldfish, which I hear is actually quite good, considering the size of the brain of the goldfish, but is still an amount of time you might think to be small. What happened last week? Last month? Last year? I don’t know. All I know is I am here, it is noon, I am on my knees, and the time is turning and turning and turning away. Maybe I forget because I am always in the present? Maybe I lose time because I know it doesn’t matter? Maybe the point is to continue without a sign, without a measure, without a guide or goal? To wake up and rise and live in this day, each day, whatever it is, clover or otherwise. You want to see my hands? They are empty, as empty now as the first note.

Read the poem here.

I Love This Poem by Frank O'Hara

“Animals”

I don’t know who was the best of all Frank O’Hara’s days, who could “manage cocktails out of ice and water,” but when I read this poem, I know who was mine. I see her, she who could make magic out of the dirt off her sneaker, who could spin a forest to a city, any city to any time in history. Alchemist, activist, artist and dreamer. She was a maker, a weaver, the spider and the web, making herself as she made stories and music and games and potion and fire. Every sunrise was for her and every sunset another promise for further magic, another presentation fine and fat on a platter as big as she was, its eyes closed, mouth smiling around the fruit. No measurement, no itinerary, just one clever clever girl and the whole world a meal she’d never finish, and that’s fine. I love this poem because I love to remember the best of all my days, because I am reminded they are still today, she is still here with me taking corners too fast and pulling tricks from our coat sleeves and pockets.

Read the poem here.

I Love This Poem by Leon Stokesbury

“Unsent Message to My Brother in His Pain”

What I love about this poem by Leon Stokesbury is that it surprises me on every read with its newness. I think surprise and newness are just gratitude you didn’t have to work for. Listen to me. I have read this poem many times over 20 years – stumbling upon it periodically in a textbook I bought for some class I probably got a C in – and every time I am struck. It is as good as seeing thick clouds muscle themselves in a shell-pink sky before flowering into a lightning storm. I’ll never get tired of such spectacle. Listen to me. Every day there is something new or even old that’s worth taking another look: a hot meal cooked with wine, a companion whose face in repose promises the possibility of true rest, listen to me: the storm clouds, again, always, the storm clouds. I am grateful often to be surprised by my own gratitude, and I do find myself sometimes pleading with others to listen to me. It seems important to tell you there are things all around as good as this poem.

Read the poem here.

I Love This Poem by Denise Levertov

“Living”

What I love about this poem by Denise Levertov is the balm it offers – a cool, wet salamander held out in an open palm and then nothing. I read this poem a lot, often finding my way to it when life feels too heavy and too hard. The poem reminds me that the passage of time is certain and maybe the only thing that really is. This day will pass, and the next, and the one after that. I find that very comforting: to know that things will end, especially when things are too heavy and too hard. Of course, good things end, too. Summer will end. Summer is always ending. I think that’s okay. This poem isn’t about holding on to anything – it’s about simply letting each day be the day that it is, each moment its own moment and then gone. The salamander will crawl from your hand (if you let it – you should let it). Each minute is the last minute. That’s living.

Read the poem here and read more about Denise Levertov here.

I Love This Poem by James Tate

“Manna”

What I love about this poem by James Tate is that I have been inside of it myself, many times. Some of my clearest, most crystal memories are of stillness in the night. Of walking home from somewhere where I’d been drinking and finding myself alone. I can tell you some of these: North 9th Street and University Avenue. It was snowing thick, soft flakes that glowed yellow in the streetlights (back when we still had the halogens) and I was with someone, but who doesn’t matter, because I was alone. My 18th birthday walking downtown alongside the giant body of a moving freight train. We were headed to the porn store because it was my 18th birthday, my friends and I, alone. Profoundly alone, even when I am physically not – that is, in the company of friends or a lover, near a vehicle, watching vehicles – I am alone. The world is empty. A car is merely moving. The person beside me a memory, something stored on the other side of my mind. Light is a wave I can see. Nothing exists outside of me or this moment.

I feel this particular aloneness often lately, as so many of us are trying more and more to stay inside, to in earnest build solitude in order to stay safe. It feels lonely to be anywhere – the grocery, the park, online, at home. There are people, but they are not your people, and they cannot be a part of you. Interaction is a danger. Space to hold yourself inside of, alone, so precious. You find more often now than ever that you are alone.

In my experience, these moments are impenetrable. I’ve never been alone together. What I love about this poem by James Tate is that it asks: what if someone could find a way into your aloneness? What if that profound and quiet space could be shared, briefly, by a perfect stranger? What if they could reach inside of it and say something like your name?

Read the poem here and read more about James Tate here.

I Love This Poem by Jason B. Crawford

“Notes on Cruising the rest stop off exit 187 at 11:45 pm”

What I love about this poem by Jason B. Crawford is its complexity. The speaker is cruising – looking for sex in a rest stop bathroom. The stakes are relatively low – “The ritual is simple” – if you stop there. But the poem doesn’t. There is real danger, actual danger: “Beware of the attendants, or the officers, or the predators shaped like a soft tongue,” and there is the very real danger of emotion, of the fact that this act (which is “easy”) is maybe tied to something deeper, something haunted and hurting. “What a mess we’ve made of these throats trying to paint straight lines.”

I love a poem that isn’t afraid to get messy, to hold a mirror up to our lives, our choices, our actions which are rarely anything but messy. I love a poem that deals with life’s complexity. I love a poem that lets “the symphony of sinks curtain close themselves into a dry, wanting sky”. It’s a beautiful poem, it’s a sad poem, it makes my heart ache, but it’s also a little sexy, and kind of fun, and that’s complicated, and that’s dangerous, and that’s why I love this poem.

Read the poem here in Issue 10 of Spilled Milk Magazine.

Jason B. Crawford is a black, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as Wellington Street Review, Barren Magazine, The Amistad, and Kissing Dynamite, he is also the Editor in Charge for The Knight’s Library Magazine. His chapbook collection Summertime Fine was a Short List selection for Nightingale & Gale. You can find more of his work at https://www.jasonbcrawford.com/