"Z" by Julie Marie Wade

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 1, 2017   Z   Julie Marie Wade

Citadel of our best names—angsty Zooey & chatty Zarathustra,               wee Zaccheus & mighty Zorro. (Zebediah, of course, would                            place among them.)    Experiment in endings (A-Z), as in "where the A ends up," the crooked        path               an A could take toward some arrival's gate (zig-zag).    Or Z-pack: superhero strength contained in capsules.    Like the 7, crossed or uncrossed, mustachioed or not,               the Z with its dashing  good looks & flaming androgyny,  its                            cursive tail & tiger purr.    That Z, its maze of contradictions, shape-shifter & fortress of finality:                N's topsy-turvy cousin, S's more callous sidekick,   The stuff of caped-crusader skirmishes: ZAP! &  ZOOM!    Enabler of interjections (think Wowie Zowie! think Zoinks!)                Symphonic doppelgänger shadowing xylophone & disguise.    The verbage of bees, buzzing all day in a hive.    Zeta or zed, its dialectical relatives, or the numeral 3,                 Z's bodacious brother on its mother's side.           Ambiguous, flirtatious, & worth 10 points on the Scrabble board,                 Z turns out to be quite the catch—zany, zesty, & remarkably                            well-read.   But despite its zeal, Z can also communicate quietly, eloquent as an             ideogram.                 It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring…   How do we know? Just look at the rocket of Zs rising out of his mouth.            Copyright © 2017 Julie Marie Wade. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "The first poem I ever published was a meditation on the letter Y.  I'd been wanting to write about individual letters for some time, but it wasn't until I saw an exhibit of Harold Edgerton's images at a Pittsburgh gallery that I knew how I wanted my letter-poems to feel. Edgerton used strobe flash photography to capture balloons in the process of bursting, milk in the process of splashing, and perhaps most famously, a bullet slicing through a playing card. To my mind, he captured how a seemingly singular object or event—the balloon that burst, the milk that splashed—was many things at once, many textures and colors and motions—the way that words are to me, and letters, and sounds. Eventually, I hope to write a poem for every letter of the alphabet, but not being a big stickler for linearity, I decided to write 'Z' now." —Julie Marie Wade   Julie Marie Wade is the author of SIX (Red Hen Press, 2016). She teaches at Florida International University and lives in Florida. Poetry by Wade   Six (Red Hen Press, 2016)  "Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways" by Brenda Hillman "Alphabet of Mother Language" by Anne Waldman "alphabet [excerpt]" by Inger Christensen Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. If you enjoy Poem-a-Day, please consider making a donation to help make it possible. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038