from "Plan Upon Arrival" by Saretta Morgan

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend January 2, 2019   from "Plan Upon Arrival"   Saretta Morgan

7. Letters arrived in intervals, as with everything else one might come, one might not regardless of whether there'd been a response. We prepared at all times. Bent over. We dreamed things would be different. Every time the door opened we each smiled in a way to make clear we'd never seen our own face.   8. An appendix washed up, pages current-smoothed, leaning funny. We stood and watched the skin stretched and sewn. The so-called imaginary, so-called interior, so-called paradoxical private sphere.   13. Dailiness was the anxiety through which we waited. Buttons undone, like clearance. Not what we wanted but what we didn't know we had to have. Private acts to attempt in public. Productive relationships to sites of violence. Lace-fronts. A dollar to run to the store.   19. However useful, the language was degrading, incompatible and lacked necessary verbs. The ability to compress, overflow and alter the landscape through a low swollen hum. To smell strongly in the morning, at the grocery or over the phone.   24. There were moments we were incapable of decision. An opening through which to register an image pungent through its own material law. A body pulled inward, door unlocked. Irresponsible to. That this moment would return. Return us. That this, and only this, would be the day.            Copyright © 2019 Saretta Morgan. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "'Plan Upon Arrival' is a book-length poem set in the landscape of my family's farm of over eighty years in the Florida panhandle. I'm interested in the intimate accounting of rural black life as a means to register and transcribe the region's physical transformations conditioned by indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery, anti-black resource management, the placement of a federal prison, and increasingly aggressive coastal storms." —Saretta Morgan   Saretta Morgan is the author of Plan Upon Arrival, forthcoming from Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour in 2020, and Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Press, 2018), among other books. She teaches poetry at Arizona State University and lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Poetry by Morgan   Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) "The Bathers, Cassis" by Garrett Hongo "Looking for The Gulf Motel" by Richard Blanco "The Book of Lamenting" by Lory Bedikian January Guest Editor: TC Tolbert   Thanks to TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press, 2014), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A with Tolbert about their curating approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year. 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