on the poetry that fed my 2020

I’ve kept track of the books I’ve read each year since 2017. It’s its own personal chronology - like a life soundtrack but nerdier. When I look at the list I remember reading Girl, Woman, Other in the thick of summer, often outside at a local park. And Jane Eyre at the dawn of this year, 2019 still fresh on my tongue, dreaming of a transformative 2020...I got what I asked for, just not how I expected it.

I wrote two dozen poems this year, often while reading a book of poems. Poetry made up about 25% of my year’s books. I underline, circle, and asterisk the lines that haunt me, thrill me, make me laugh, or think too hard. Here’s a partial best-of compilation. My 2020 in poems:

from Keith S. Wilson’s Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love

it is fair/
that i try
to love your skin even when it is not touching my own
my lowest hum /
I want to widen the eyes of God.
the bruise that became/
the sky:
Who could love you/
like this? Who else will sew you in the stars?

from Danez Smith’s Homie

faces screwed up with that first & cleanest love
o  California, don’t you know the sun is only a god/
if you learn to starve for her?
tupac of a flower
my nigga is death any easier/
if you can call your
killer kin
& the miracle of other people’s lives
& all of us who come from people who/
signed with x’s
say it with your whole black mouth
our mothers make the same face when/
they think of God
make love under rusted moons
may all the hood niggas who humor my wet/
be blessed with some fly shit: 24s, condos
enough & some healthcare.
I feel most colored when I’m looking at my bank account
how often have i loved a thing because you loved it?/
including me

from Leila Chatti’s Deluge

this first vermillion drip
It says God has plans for you. It says/
I didn’t say they were good.
When asked my religion I answer surrender.
A miniature/
dimpled sun
you turned against yourself/
and once you knew it
The nakedness of woman is the/
work of God.

from Anais Duplan’s Take This stallion

Something about orgasms or birthday parties.
Thanks/be to god who does not dial for an ambulance
ankle-bones
I, on the other hand,
make sure to wash my mouth
whenever I say something slippery
As soon as you walked into the room
all the flowers said O hell yes
The fly I named Henry/because it had that look

from Aricka Foreman’s Salt Body Shimmer

You want chicken or steak Get Over It Who ain’t been raped
pooling cologne into his palms, blessing the edges of jaw/
arch of neck, having remembered less beautiful preparations
into the nook in the back of my knee.
pink empty belly, wet
But oh, what the clit will do/
to remember a collaborative song,