The rest of Feranmi’s poem says this:

[…] Own a spot on a cliff or an edge
or somewhere that can carry a stamp of your body.
Become. Open a book and see this trapped time
I left for you to live all over.

“All over again” is the common voicing of that adverbial phrase. The writer’s omission of the final word is a canny stroke that lends broader reach to the poem’s ending.

Ascendent MAGA’s infatuation with the Putin-Xi-Orban-Meloni-Farage-Hogan mold of a man bodes ill in the near term for the love sadly labeled forbidden. “We’re going to unwoke the state,” says the new leader of the Wyoming State House, just to give you a flavor of what’s rumbling in the mountain meadows and high plains.

Still and all, be it that poetry makes nothing happen, as the poet wrote, poetry is happening smartly, nevertheless, in unconfined passion dimensions, and that’s not nothing. In fact it has long legs, because the poems featured in Poetry, January-February 2025, whose subtitle is Young People’s Poetry, are the work of cycle breakers who will outlive the administration’s dysfunction by decades.

There’s more tight craft, robust turns and singeing warmth in this issue than I was expecting. (I was going to say, “than I was prepared for,” but if I’m not prepared for it now, when? You prepare for poetry by falling down on your face in piles of it.)

Consider Vanessa Deering’s “so coffee is a laxative & i am writing this poem on the toilet.” That’s the title. The poem’s opening is a brisk setup:

in the building two women’s restroom & in the strangest places
i want to tell you the most mundane things
[…]

The singular “restroom” echoes what’s written on the door, not what syntax expects; it’s a tiny detail dropped precisely. The poem objectifies “what the sharpness of wanting you tastes like” around the extra squirt of vanilla in the speaker’s coffee proferred by a winking barista.

[…]
i finish my own sentences after walking you home
is it too early to say | my smile misses you? my smile’s smile | crescent
moony-gazed
[…]

In extolling the sheen of radiant eyes, the text resorts to the poetical adjective “gossamer” — best avoided, like “incarnadine,” in verse not meant to sound fusty — but the slip is redeemed by an ending I find revelatory:

[…]
like beesting,
i am afraid of my own swollen heart
i am so afraid for you

At first I read it as “beestings,” meaning the cow’s colostrum, a dense nutrient for the newborn calf. The context, however, suggests “bee sting.” The poem’s invigorating insight resides in the expressed fear of the heart beating in the speaker’s own breast, alongside the speaker’s fear for (!) the object of fresh attraction.

(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved