"Mixed with always:" by Soham Patel

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend February 16, 2018   Mixed with always:   Soham Patel

Your songs             are the impossible ruins             that keep the hours on turn.             Keep awe bare like sound at night. The candle burn. Ice melts and wax. The dirt on your mind. Engines roll in clutter. Clank cool and electrify the room. We always become mysterious— birds at the end of each evening. Whoever does the telling stops time like a crescendo. We hit blue notes so the edges of your honey jars rattle laughter against our teeth. Rhythm breaks like need or the knowledge a mouth organ has about breath and tone, blood and gravity and balance— all those sweet sounds that can make even windows shatter.                Copyright © 2018 Soham Patel. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "This is a page from a larger collection titled to afar from afar. I was thinking about sound and the difficulty of war—the harmonica shows up to help think through it. Some of the phrasing owes debt to the poet Kate Beles." —Soham Patel   Soham Patel is the author of the poetry collections to afar from afar, forthcoming from Writ Large Press in March, and ever really hear it, forthcoming from Subito Press in November and winner of the 2017 Subito Prize.     Photo credit: Chuck Stebelton Poetry by Patel   to afar from afar (Writ Large Press, 2018) "Daisy Cutter" by Camille T. Dungy "War Music [Down on your knees, Achilles]" by Christopher Logue "Dorothy Wordsworth" by Jennifer Chang February Guest Editor: Dawn Lundy Martin   Thanks to Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Martin and our other guest editors for the year. Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! 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