from "For a Daughter/No Address" by Farid Matuk

[View this email on a browser]( [Forward to a friend]( [facebook-icon]( [tumblr-icon]( [twitter-icon]( December 6, 2017 [from “For a Daughter/No Address”]( [Farid Matuk]( like the shapes we made in the things we said were demanding of us now you ask me why the sky is a tank full of lemonade out back all wet tonight and bugs call up a swamp in this desert in my story my dad wrote all the wrong names for her on a brick that could lift through my mother’s window came the words arrayed in glass dusting San Martincito on her dresser cast in plastic with spaces in his robes a home for the hen the dog made mild in the skirts of the mongrel saint still lining a thin easy silence around me come the scenes all down our street in someone’s car music each word lifted into its own space thumps in the moon’s heavy sleep breath there are extensions we can read what we said it’s such a simple printshop so mothers might tell us about what came to be more known a pear tree in the commons and really the words left idle beside if they could tell us about the forms if these came to lift them if we could ask sin miedo y sin piedad [Like this on Facebook]( [Share via Twitter]( Copyright © 2017 Farid Matuk. Used with permission of the author. [illustration]( About This Poem “This poem is from a sonnet series. The sonnet can be like a box I try to fill with water, family stories being so much water. My head did a mash-up of Genesis 1:2 and John 1:1, which left me with the notion that in the beginning, the word is carried upon the face of the waters. In the box the lines kind of slosh back and forth. Do parents give a child her face or does she make it? I don’t know much, but I know sometimes it’s good to take a face off, leave it in the water. I hope my daughter finds these words and this water when she needs them.” —Farid Matuk [Farid Matuk]( Farid Matuk’s most recent poetry collection is The Real Horse, forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in February 2018. He lives in Tucson, Arizona. [more-at-poets]( [The Real Horse]( Poetry by Matuk [The Real Horse]( (University of Arizona Press, 2018) from "genesis" by Laura Walker [read-more]( "Calculations" by Brenda Cárdenas [read-more]( "Looking at My Father" by Wendy Xu [read-more]( Help Support Poem-a-Day If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a [monthly donation]( or [one-time gift]( to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today’s poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! [Small-Blue-RGB-poets.org-Logo]( 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](. You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click [here](. © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038 From Our Sponsors [Advertisement]( [Advertisement](