"closet with the letter ‘d’ on either end" by Atom Atkinson

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend Support Poem-a-Day January 1, 2020   closet with the letter 'd' on either end   Atom Atkinson

Oh with gratitude, friends, I'm alive and thinking about this dated metaphor. 36 and doing it again, feeling new when I'm not. Forgive it, revise it. Oh I felt less closeted than doored, an "or," embellished at the teeth on either end with an outcome. Factual, I have decorated each door from the other side and never just gathering the knob in my hand. Flattened diadems collaged, I thought, cosmic radar for all our later gazing, museum tablet on and on, behind glass, canonic laser algebra, deathbed shooting star. Who's to say? That seemed like the magic a secret believer could ask from it. Oh seems. And how it follows you out. Come on get in I'm in this junker again and writing "FOR SALE" in backwards letters onto the window and adding whatever still makes noise from inside its own made up case: dated doored gazing deathbed window. Oh and pursing my lips wherever your eye falls! Oh and oh and, I'm alive! Soon enough the lethal hand of god reaches into all of us to pull out something, a heart a rib. Come outpace me if you can—already I have unlearned the name Adam, unrehearsed any story of man and woman. Decorated my body from the other side of that outcome.            Copyright © 2020 by Atom Atkinson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 1, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets. About this Poem   "This is a poem I wrote using remainders of a word bank I had compiled for a much more constrained set of formal experiments. I had been adding every word I could find that began and ended with the same letter, a sensation of enclosure I still enjoyed the traces of. The closet's binaries have felt even more necessary to refashion and reconfigure since I 'came out again' in mid-life: inside and outside, death and life, before and after, secrecy and transparency, melancholy and joy. The endings and beginnings of sentences and words and lifespans became a zone of play for me as I wrote this poem, a zone my body asks to enter every day." —Atom Atkinson   Atom Atkinson is a teacher, a doctoral student at the University of Utah, the director of writing programs at Catapult, and part of the poetry collective Line Assembly. They live in Brooklyn, New York. "It Is Important To Be Something" by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza "In the Dream" by Jenny Johnson "Part of Eve's Discussion" by Marie Howe January Guest Editor: Meg Day   Thanks to Meg Day, author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A about Day's curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year. A culture break, a source of daily renewal...   If reading Poem-a-Day has become a meaningful part of your day, please consider supporting this free series with a donation. Your gift makes publishing Poem-a-Day 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   Unsubscribe here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

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