At the Gym
By Mark Doty

This salt-stain spot
marks the place where men
lay down their heads,
back to the bench,

and hoist nothing
that need be lifted
but some burden they’ve chosen
this time: more reps,

more weight, the upward shove
of it leaving, collectively,
this sign of where we’ve been:
shroud-stain, negative

flashed onto the vinyl
where we push something
unyielding skyward,
gaining some power

at least over flesh,
which goads with desire,
and terrifies with frailty.
Who could say who’s

added his heat to the nimbus
of our intent, here where
we make ourselves:
something difficult

lifted, pressed or curled,
Power over beauty,
power over power!
Though there’s something more

tender, beneath our vanity,
our will to become objects
of desire: we sweat the mark
of our presence onto the cloth.

Here is some halo
the living made together.

About the Poet

Mark Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee, on August 10, 1953. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Deep Lane (W. W. Norton, 2015); A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: A Compendium of Creatures(Prestel, 2013); Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008), which received the National Book Award; School of the Arts(HarperCollins, 2005); Source(HarperCollins, 2002); and Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998). Other collections include Atlantis(HarperCollins, 1995), which received the Ambassador Book Award, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award; My Alexandria (University of Illinois Press, 1993), chosen by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize, and  a National Book Award finalist; Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (D.R. Godine, 1991); and Turtle, Swan (D.R. Godine, 1987).

In 2010, Graywolf Press published Doty’s collection of essays on poetry titled The Art of Description: World into Word, in which Doty asserts that “poetry concretizes the singular, unrepeatable moment; it hammers out of speech a form for how it feels to be oneself.”

Doty is also a noted memoirist. In 2020, he published What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life (W. W. Norton), in which he traces his own experiences alongside those of Whitman, in the context of the elder poet’s creation of his best-known work, Leaves of Grass. In 1996, Doty released Heaven’s Coast (HarperCollins), which received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. His other memoirs are Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2007); Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (Beacon Press, 2000); and Firebird (HarperCollins, 1999). He has also edited The Best American Poetry 2012.

Doty has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation. He served as a Chancellor  of the Academy of American Poets from 2011 to 2016.

Doty has taught at the University of Houston and is currently serving as a distinguished writer at Rutgers University. He lives in New York City.

Sissy
By Aaron Smith

I can’t remember my dad calling me a sissy,
but he definitely told me not to be a sissy.
I secretly (or not so secretly) liked all the sissy
things. We had a hunting dog named Sissy.
Really: Sissy. My father nicknamed my sister: Sissy.
Still, he says, “How’s Sissy?” and calls her Sissy
when she goes home to visit him. Belinda (Sissy)
is one of the toughest people I know. My sissy
(sister) has kicked someone’s ass, which isn’t sissy-
ish, I guess, though I want to redefine sissy
into something fabulous, tough, tender, “sissy-
tough.” Drag queens are damn tough and sissies.
I’m pretty fucking tough and a big, big sissy,
too. And kind. Tough and kind and happy: a sissy.

About the Poem

Aaron Smith explains his poem: “As a queer person, I’ve had the word ‘sissy’ leveled against me as an insult. In this sonnet, I challenged myself to use the word ‘sissy’ as the ending word for each line in an attempt to reclaim the word, celebrate it, redefine it—as I say in the poem—as something ‘fabulous, tough, tender.’ I also wanted to celebrate drag queens. RuPaul [Andre Charles] is a national treasure.”

I’ve posted this poem before, and it is always one of those poems that really speaks to me. Like Smith, my dad never called me a sissy, but I heard more than once, “Don’t be a sissy.” I remember when I was in grammar school, all the boys played flag football at recess. I had no interest in playing football, so I spent recess with my friends, all the girls. My dad came to pick me up from school one day (recess was at the end of the day), and he noticed that I was not playing football with the rest of the boys. He told me that I had to play with the boys and “not be such a sissy.” So, from then on, when he would pick me up at school, I’d have to play flag football.

Years ago, I read a book, Mississippi Sissy. The book is a memoir by Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who as the Amazon description says, “grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South.” As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word “sissy” on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin’s long road north towards celebrity begins. In his memoir, Kevin Sessums brings to life the pungent American south of the 1960s and the world of the strange little boy who grew there.

There are words that haunt me because of the pain they caused me growing up: sissy, queer, faggot (fag), etc. I know many gay men use these as empowering words, such as Sessum and Smith do in their writing. Others celebrate their sexuality and gender non-conformity. As the poem says, “Drag queens are damn tough and sissies.” But it’s not just drag queens that are celebrating gender non-conformity. Many of us live our lives these days without the fear of being called a “sissy.” Though, there are still many like me who continue to care what others think. It’s difficult for us to break free from the traditional gender roles that were forced on us when we were young. Maybe more of us should realize that we are “pretty fucking tough and a big, big sissy, too. And kind. Tough and kind and happy: a sissy.”

About the Poet

Aaron Smith has an MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. 

Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Primer (University of Pittsburgh Press); Appetite (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and Blue on Blue Ground (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His other awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Mass Cultural Council. 

Smith is an associate professor of creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

In the Forest
By Oscar Wilde

Out of the mid-wood’s twilight
Into the meadow’s dawn,
Ivory limbed and brown-eyed,
Flashes my Faun!

He skips through the copses singing,
And his shadow dances along,
And I know not which I should follow,
Shadow or song!

O Hunter, snare me his shadow!
O Nightingale, catch me his strain!
Else moonstruck with music and madness
I track him in vain!

About The Poem

“In the Forest” appears in the “Uncollected Poems” (1876–1893) section of the volume Poems, with The Ballad of Reading Gaol, published in 1909 by Methuen & Company. During the 1890s, Wilde faced three criminal and civil trials due to his relationship with the poet Lord Alfred Douglas. In March 1946, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse published the article “Oscar Wilde’s Poetry as Art History” by American poet Edouard Roditi, who wrote: “The evolution of Wilde’s descriptive style in his poetry, from the museum-piece ornateness of his earlier works to the simpler and more delicate art of his more mature poems, was accompanied, moreover, by an analogous evolution of his poetry’s intellectual content, from the discussion of general problems of politics, ethics or esthetics to a greater attention to personal impressions or to the elucidation of particular problems of the poet’s life, such as his temptations and moral conflicts. […] Wilde proved his ability to compose, had he but dared, a body of poems, on themes of sin, suffering and remorse, which might have been the Fleurs du Mal of English literature, with much of Baudelaire’s concise quality as opposed to Swinburne’s vagueness.”

About the Poet

Oscar Wilde, born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 16, 1854, was a playwright and poet. His first book of poetry, Ravenna (T. Shrimpton and Son, 1878) won the Newdigate Prize. Wilde won more acclaim for his plays, particularly An Ideal Husband (L. Smithers, 1899) and The Importance of Being Earnest (E. Matthews and John Lane, 1899). He died in Paris on November 30, 1900.

Notes For Further Study
By Christopher Salerno

You are a nobody
until another man leaves
a note under your wiper:
I like your hair, clothes, car—call me!
Late May, I brush pink
Crepe Myrtle blossoms
from the hood of my car.
Again spring factors
into our fever. Would this
affair leave any room for error?
What if I only want
him to hum me a lullaby.
To rest in the nets
of our own preferences.
I think of women
I’ve loved who, near the end,
made love to me solely
for the endorphins. Praise
be to those bodies lit
with magic. I pulse
my wipers, sweep away pollen
from the windshield glass
to allow the radar
detector to detect. In the prim
light of spring I drive
home alone along the river’s
tight curves where it bends
like handwritten words.
On the radio, a foreign love
song some men sing to rise.

About the Poet

Christopher Salerno was born on June 13, 1975, in Somerville, New Jersey. He received an MA from East Carolina University and an MFA from Bennington College.

Salerno is the author of Sun & Urn (University of Georgia Press, 2017), winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize; ATM (Georgetown Review Press, 2014), winner of the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize; Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Press, 2010), winner of the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize; and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006).

In the judge’s citation for the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize, D. A. Powell writes, “Salerno rifles through our empty wallets to show how much we’re missing. These poems are mystical transactions of body and soul, as dark as Faust and as illuminating.”

Salerno has also received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He currently serves as an editor at Saturnalia Books and teaches at William Paterson University. He lives in Caldwell, New Jersey.

Interim
By Clarissa Scott Delany

The night was made for rest and sleep,
For winds that softly sigh;
It was not made for grief and tears;
So then why do I cry?

The wind that blows through leafy trees
Is soft and warm and sweet;
For me the night is a gracious cloak
To hide my soul’s defeat.

Just one dark hour of shaken depths,
Of bitter black despair—
Another day will find me brave,
And not afraid to dare.

About the Poet

Clarissa Scott Delany was born Clarissa Mae Scott in Tuskegee, Alabama. She was the daughter of Emmet Jay Scott, secretary to Booker T. Washington and special advisor on African American affairs to President Woodrow Wilson, and Elenor Baker Scott. She attended Bradford Academy in Massachusetts and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College in 1923. This accomplishment landed her a cover article in The Crisis magazine in June 1923.

Delany gathered frequently with other young Black people in Boston at the Literary Guild. Claude McKay was among the institution’s featured speakers. She traveled to France and Germany and later published the essay “A Golden Afternoon in Germany,” inspired by this period, in Opportunity magazine. Delany then moved to Washington, D.C., and taught at Dunbar High School until 1926. While there, she joined the Saturday Nighters Club, a salon hosted by Georgia Douglas Johnson.

Delany entered her poem “Solace” in a contest hosted by Opportunity. She tied for fourth place, and the poem was eventually anthologized, alongside her other poems, “Joy” and “The Mask,” in Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties (Harper & Brothers, 1927). Some of her other poems were also anthologized in Arna Bontemps’s and Langston Hughes’s The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 (Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1949). 

Delany later moved to New York City, where she became a social worker and the director of the Joint Committee on the Negro Child Study. She published findings on delinquency and child neglect among Black children. She died at twenty-six of kidney disease.

Sonnet 116
By William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
    If this be error and upon me proved,
    I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

About the Poem

Along with Sonnets 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) and 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), Sonnet 116 is one of the most famous sonnets. Traditionally, this sonnet has been almost universally read as a sonnet of praise or triumph to ideal and eternal love, with which all readers could easily identify, adding their own dream of perfection to what they found within it, modern criticism makes it possible to look beneath the idealism and to see some hints of a world which is perhaps slightly more disturbed than the poet pretends. In the first place it is important to see that the sonnet belongs in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Sonnet 116 is sandwiched between three sonnets which discuss the philosophical question of how love deceives a person’s eyes, mind, and judgement. Sonnet 116 is then followed by four others which attempt to excuse the poet’s own unfaithfulness and betrayal of the beloved.

Most scholars thought agree that Sonnet 116 is about love in its most ideal form. The poet praises the glories of lovers who have come to each other freely and enter into a relationship based on trust and understanding. The first four lines reveal the poet’s pleasure in love that is constant and strong and will not “alter when it alteration finds.” The following lines proclaim that true love is indeed an “ever-fix’d mark” which will survive any crisis. In lines 7-8, the poet claims that we may be able to measure love to some degree but does not mean we fully understand it. Love’s actual worth cannot be known and remains a mystery. The remaining lines of the third quatrain (9-12), reaffirm the perfect nature of love that is unshakeable throughout time and remains so “ev’n to the edge of doom,” i.e., death. In the final couplet, the poet declares that, if he is mistaken about the constant, unmovable nature of perfect love, then he must take back all his writings on love, truth, and faith. Moreover, he adds that, if he has in fact judged love inappropriately, no man has ever really loved, in the ideal sense that the poet professes.

Steps
By Hermann Hesse

As every blossom fades
and all youth sinks into old age,
so every life’s design, each flower of wisdom,
attains its prime and cannot last forever.
The heart must submit itself courageously
to life’s call without a hint of grief,
A magic dwells in each beginning,
protecting us, telling us how to live.

High purposed we shall traverse realm on realm,
cleaving to none as to a home,
the world of spirit wishes not to fetter us
but raise us higher, step by step.
Scarce in some safe accustomed sphere of life
have we establish a house, then we grow lax;
only he who is ready to journey forth
can throw old habits off.

Maybe death’s hour too will send us out new-born
towards undreamed-lands,
maybe life’s call to us will never find an end
Courage my heart, take leave and fare thee well.

Stufen
By Hermann Hesse

Wie jede Blüte welkt und jede Jugend
Dem Alter weicht, blüht jede Lebensstufe,
Blüht jede Weisheit auch und jede Tugend
Zu ihrer Zeit und darf nicht ewig dauern.
Es muß das Herz bei jedem Lebensrufe
Bereit zum Abschied sein und Neubeginne,
Um sich in Tapferkeit und ohne Trauern
In andre, neue Bindungen zu geben.
Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne,
Der uns beschützt und der uns hilft, zu leben.

Wir sollen heiter Raum um Raum durchschreiten
An keinem wie an einer Heimat hängen,
Der Weltgeist will nicht fesseln uns und engen,
Er will uns Stuf’ um Stufe heben, weiten.
Kaum sind wir heimisch einem Lebenskreise
Und traulich eingewohnt, so droht Erschlaffen,
Nur wer bereit zu Aufbruch ist und Reise,
Mag lähmender Gewöhnung sich entraffen.

Es wird vielleicht auch noch die Todesstunde
Uns neuen Räumen jung entgegen senden
Des Lebens Ruf an uns wird niemals enden…
Wohlan denn, Herz, nimm Abschied und gesunde!

About the Poem

Hermann Hesse wrote “Stufen” in 1941. You may be familiar with Hesse’s novels Siddhartha or Steppenwolf, which revolve around the inner transformations of their characters, a theme that is also found in Hesse’s shorter works. “Stufen”, or “Steps” (also translated as “Stages”), reads like the themes in his novels edited down to a single poem. But like most poetry, it’s not written in simple and direct language. You’ll probably find new meaning in lines each time you read the poem and understand them differently each time. There are numerous translations of the poem, and this one was translated line by line. Often translations of poems either try to simply translate the words, others try to keep it in the original poetic form, and others try more to capture the theme of the poem than translate word for work. I don’t often use translated poems, because native speakers of the language often find fault with the translation.

About the Poet

Hermann Hesse (born July 2, 1877, Calw, Germany—died August 9, 1962, Montagnola, Switzerland) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge, and spirituality. His characters attempt to break out of the established modes of civilization so as to find an essential spirit and identity.

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.

Nonno’s Poem
By Tennessee Williams

How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair,

Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.

A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mould,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then

An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth’s obscene, corrupting love.

And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?

Nearly 30 years ago while I was still in high school, I was attending a summer honors program at the University of Alabama. (It was a momentous summer in many ways, but those are stories for another time.) We took three college classes along with other summer students at Alabama, and every week, we had to attend several honors seminars. One of those seminars was about Tennessee Williams.

The next week, we were taken by bus down to Montgomery to see Williams’s play “The Night of the Iguana” at the Alabama Shakespeare FestivaL. I’ve seen many plays and musicals at ASF, and while not all of the plays were great (I always found the plays that were part of their Southern Writers Series to be godawful), they were all very well produced. I was awed by “The Night of the Iguana” because they made it rain onstage. This might not sound that impressive to everyone, but I always thought it was one of the coolest things.

If you are not familiar with “The Night of the Iguana,” the play portrays the story of Reverend Shannon, a defrocked Episcopal clergyman gone astray, torn between his passions and his devotion, who leads a bus-load of middle-aged Baptist women on a religious-themed tour of the Mexican coast and comes to terms with past demons in re-evaluating his life.

Throughout the play, in a secondary story about a woman, Hannah, and her aging poet-grandfather, the grandfather attempts to finish a poem he feels will be his masterpiece. The poem comes at the end of the play when the grandfather recites his “last” poem while Hannah transcribes it for him. The grandfather dies a few moments later.

The poem represents Tennessee Williams’s poetic view of human nature and the human story. Williams wrote many flawed or tragic characters who might survive, adapt, or make significant change if they only had the courage and confidence that goes with that important quality. Tennessee Williams is not to everyone’s taste, but I have always greatly admired his writing. Of Mississippi literary figures, I consider Williams to be the greatest by far.

Self-Portrait as Combination Taco Bell / Pizza Hut / KFC
By Aaron Tyler Hand

the unholy trinity of suburban late-night salvation
barring seemingly endless options of worship

bean burrito breadsticks and mashed potatoes
or a soft taco pan pizza and a buttered biscuit

an unimaginable combination of food flavors
for people not ready to go home to their parents

and yet none of the options feel quite right
so maybe I should call it Self-Portrait as idling

in a drive-thru with your friends crammed
across the sunken bench seats avoiding

the glow of the check engine light with black tape
pressed with a precision unseen anywhere else

in their lives as a fractured voice says don’t worry
take your time and order whenever you’re ready

from behind a menu backlit like the window
inside of a confessional booth as the hands

of the driver open up like a collection basket
for the wadded-up bills and loose change

that slowly stack up as the years go by
and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be

in this analogy but I know about masking
warning signs and hearing out of tune

voices scream WE’RE THE KIDS WHO FEEL
LIKE DEAD ENDS so instead I’ll call it Self-

Portrait as From Under the Cork Tree
or maybe even Self-Portrait as whatever

album people listen to when they love
their friends and still want to feel connected

to the grass walls of a teenage wasteland
that they can’t help but run away from

About This Poem

“I love using poetry to capture the malaise of growing up in the suburbs. When you spend your life in a place that feels defined by its monotony, it’s hard to find a sense of personal identity that isn’t mass produced. In order to feel like you have any control over your life, you have to find the small rebellions that lead to a sense of belonging. That aimlessness and escapism is what I tried to capture in this poem.”—Aaron Tyler Hand

This poem was the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day yesterday. While I found the title intriguing, I found the scene it sets nostalgic. I did not grow up in the suburbs, but in rural Alabama;, however, when I was in undergraduate and graduate school, I remember the late nights of getting Taco Bell, though in graduate school, it was often Krystal’s, which was open 24 hours and a block from my first apartment.

The title itself made me think of probably what all of us thought the first time we saw a combination “Taco Bell / Pizza Hut / KFC”: fast food with a personality disorder. It does seem kind of lost in what it is trying to do. I usually only see Taco Bells and KFCs together these days, but it’s still an odd combination.

About the Poet

Aaron Tyler Hand (@airinhand) is a creative writer with an MFA from Texas State University. He has previously been published in San Antonio Express-News, Houston Chronicle, Faultline Journal, GASHER Journal, HASH Journal, Funicular Magazine, Meniscus, among others. In addition to his own creative writing pursuits, Aaron volunteers his time to the prison teaching non-profit Rough Draft and hosts the poetry podcast The Personhood Project.