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Thơ Mỗi Ngày II

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  Thơ Mỗi Ngày Shadow Publishing Company   This couple strolling arm in arm Must be figments of someone's revery. They stop often to linger over a kiss, But when people look their way, It's as if they do not see them. It's the heat, the blue dusk, The air of enchantment On the street of overgrown lilacs And screened porches Where a door is already open for them.   An old woman waits in the dim entrance With a pitcher of cold lemonade And two tall glasses on a tray. She wants them to rest awhile In her own wedding bed and they obey.   Her late husband was an eye doctor. His surgical instruments lie in glass cage Gleaming like cold moonlight In dark cuffs, he made the blind see By removing their bandages.   In a room shaded against the heat, With a few slender lines of light On the high ceiling, And that strange sense of taking on the life Of someone unknown just then,   Lying there, closing one's eyes in revery, A figment among figments Living one of their b...
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Harryette Mullen, The Art of Poetry No. 120

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  Harryette Mullen , The Art of Poetry No. 120 Interviewed by Sonya Posmentier Issue 256, Summer 2026 Reading at Cave Canem, at Mount Saint Alphonsus in Esopus, New York, 1999. Photograph courtesy of the Cave Canem Records, James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection in the Collection of American Literature, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.   My conversations with Harryette Mullen in Los Angeles this past December took place mostly on foot. Over the course of the three days of my visit, Mullen acted simultaneously as subject and tour guide: we walked around the campus of the University of California Los Angeles, where she teaches poetry, African American literature, and creative writing in the English department; along the cold, windy Santa Monica Pier; through the MONUMENTS exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA ; in the Mathias Botanical Garden, where she pointed out plants (a ginkgo, a Kentucky coffee tree) that had found their way into he...
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