PoetryMagazine.com Guest Editor Feature Poet Lucille Lang Day

PoetryMagazine.com

Lucille Lang Day -
Guest Editor
USA

Lucille Lang Day (http://lucillelangday.com) has published ten poetry collections and chapbooks, most recently Becoming an Ancestor and Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems, which won the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Prize. She is also co-editor of the anthology Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California as well as the author of a children’s book, Chain Letter, and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, which received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her poems, short stories, and essays have received nine Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. She received her MA in English and MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University, and her MA in zoology and PhD in science/mathematics education at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, writer Richard Michael Levine.

ALL THE GOOD POEMS

“All the good poems
have already been written,”
I was warned when I started
writing poetry. I still wonder
how there can always be more
to say. It seems that poems
are everywhere: hunched under
every table and crumpled
in every trashcan. Numerous
as dust mites in an old mattress,
they outnumber the cells
of our bodies billions to one
and still keep multiplying
like bacteria or viruses.
Listen, your poem is waiting
for you in your sock drawer,
luminous as a new star
coalescing in the blue-black
vastness of space. But is it
unique as the new members
of every species that sprout
from seeds or descend
through birth canals each day?
Is it lovely as Applegate’s
paintbrush with its sticky stems
and red flowers that flame
again and again each spring
across the Western states?

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