Ama Codjoe

Koreatown, Los Angeles
Gwendolyn Brooks stood stark naked.
I stared into her bespectacled eyes.

Ms. Brooks showed me how
to tend to myself by scrubbing dead skin

with a coarse wash cloth, rinsing
the body's detritus down a common drain.

My flesh was taut, loose,
and dying. Even in paradise I was dying.

At first, this surprised me. Oh, the capsized
boat of the body, Wanda Coleman sighed.

We keep sailing, even when we believe
we're ashore. Coleman drifted to sleep

on the heated jade floor. Clasping
my spa-provided robe, I lay on my side

beside her. Do the dead
dream? I wondered to myself.

Wrong question, Coleman muttered.
I remembered sleeping beside my mother,

touching her nightgown lightly,
as if a gesture could restore the cord

that, in the beginning, tethered us. As if
I smelled her death in the satin scarf

keeping the plastic curlers in place,
or in the Vaseline glossing her arms.

In childhood, I pined for my mother
though she was there.

Here, in the afterlife, I had no mind
to search for her. I was freed

from a loss that haunted me
even before it occurred.

Gwendolyn Brooks hummed a wordless
song that stripped me of all longing.

I untied the robe's stiff belt
and walked amongst the nude women,

my skin brushed smooth and silent.
I was ordinary and motherless.

Because I was not alone,
my nakedness felt unremarkable.

I didn't miss my mother—
I didn't miss missing her.
from the book BLUEST NUDE / Milkweed Editions
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
Poetry Daily yellow logo
Northern Virginia and DC Readers

Join Poetry Daily Editorial Board members, Vivek Narayanan, author of After, and Jennifer Atkinson, author of A Gray Realm the Ocean, for a reading and conversation on Saturday, October 15 at 10:00 am.
 
This event is part of the Fall for the Book Festival.
Color headshot of Adrian Matejka
"Stopping by with Adrian Matejka"

"I think poetry is a shared thing, a gift for both the writer and the reader. If we caretake that gift to the best of our abilities, we create an experience that is simultaneously personal and collective. Fulfilling, too, if poetry does what it is capable of. Even if readers don’t agree with my politics or with my perspectives, I hope something in the music or the wordplay or allusions surprises them."

via POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover of the poetry anthology, Divining Dante
What Sparks Poetry:
Moira Egan on Franco Buffoni's "The Acne Eruptions of Eleanor of Aquitaine"

"Handling, embracing, paying extremely close attention: these are, I think, ways to describe the kind of close reading that is necessary to translation. To me, translation is an act of affectionate close reading in the original language, and then, 'close writing,' to the best of my ability, in the target language. As translators, we know that reproducing a poem in another language is a sheer impossibility."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. 
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2022 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency