"Brown Girl Has Walked Into the Wild, Palms Open" by Barbara Jane Reyes

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 29, 2018   Brown Girl Has Walked Into the Wild, Palms Open   Barbara Jane Reyes

See how she lists. The body is bent as light, as wind will it. And so you must tread light. Mind the rocks under foot. You must tread           slow. There has been drought; see where water has long ago troughed, has           carved her.                       See how she branches, twisting, her many hands reaching. Her roots also reach, sweetened from reaching. When fire arrives, she           toughens. She will slough away the thick. She will be slick, and dark beneath the           rough. She will mimic the fire her bones remember. Know her bones glisten.                       See how she rests. The body will fall, as time wills it. See how it hollows, how her pieces return to earth.           And from her thick trunk, mushrooms cluster—                                  Her belly a nest of moss and poison. When broken open, see what of her mother she has kept,                                  what of her father, what of the stars.                Copyright © 2018 Barbara Jane Reyes. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "This poem is part of a series/in-progress manuscript that includes mixtape poems, glossaries, and epistolaries to 'some brown girl,' one who finds herself to be invisible in the pages of literary works. This 'brown girl' resists being a flatly written sidepiece (as we see in the few popular culture depictions) and insists upon exploring her own rich interior life." —Barbara Jane Reyes   Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Books, 2017), a finalist for the California Book Award. Her previous collections include Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She is an adjunct professor in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at University of San Francisco. She lives in Oakland, California.   Photo credit: Peter Dressel Poetry by Reyes   Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Books, 2017) "Variations in Blue" by Lauren K. Alleyne "the blk(est) night" by Mahogany L. Browne "Interpretation of a Poem by Frost" Thylias Moss May Guest Editor: Matthew Shenoda   Thanks to Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite: Poems (TriQuarterly Books, 2014), who curated Poem-a-Day this month. Read more about Shenoda and our 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