Kiss. Baptism.

 by David Campos

The night fills with charged chatter
from the bar we exited. I ask if I can kiss
her
and wonder what door this will open.

Soon, she'll be gone for two weeks,

and I'll ride my bike out to a bench

close to a canal where the crows eat the

fallen

left-over fruit from the orchards.

They've been cleared to build new doors

over the rotting roots. Each day she's

gone,

I chain smoke to ease nerves and call her,

already out of breath. Her voice, an elixir I 

savor

like the small and sudden bursts of a 

breeze

cooling my forehead; baptism is a doorway

for faith.

It's been hard to believe in love again,

but faith is at the center of every request.

She answered by kissing me, unlocking

all the terror stored in these clouds of

flesh.

But I remember how easily and quickly

the mind travels vast distances to find

meaning

in the strange and striking shapes of our

lives.

I felt her sweat on my lips. Baptism.

from Poem-a-Day, February 13, 2026

The ecstasy now

is simply my hand scratching my head

underneath what is left of my hair

and noticing the rolled cuffs--plaid--

of the man exiting the parking lot.

Or "the man existing the parking lot,"

as I just mistakenly wrote.

There is ecstasy sometimes in intending

exiting, but writing existing.

Certainly the ecstasy now is the simple pigeon

flying through the simple sky

and my simply being able to see it.

It's the blue car,

the red car, and all the rest

of the revving motors lined up

inside my heart: that they so want

to race until the end of time.

The ecstasy now

is the gray day growing grayer.

It's even diabetes

with its bloody little pricks

delivering the glucose news.

And it's that woman over there

in the billowing dress

on the purple bicycle, deciding

at the last minute to turn left

into traffic, and still, she lives.

It is the stooped-over man

with the wide-brimmed, too-heavy hat

in that Japanese movie,

the old black-and-white one.

He goes to the doctor and overhears, by accident,

he has seventy days left; seventy-five tops. God knows

what gets into him, but he finds

a shovel and a rake and makes

a little neighborhood park by poking around

under some old trees, I don't remember, maybe oaks, 

maybe ancient maples. But big ones, trees that understand

how to dignify the little world of his neighborhood.

Day after day, the scratching and digging. The rearranging.

He lives long enough to stand under those trees,

when finally the park is done. It is December now,

day falling into darkness, big hat in hand,

snow slowly descending all around him,

those fluffy flakes that only fall

in that dreamy way in movies.

Isn't now the time to pick up your shovel and start?

by Jim Moore 
from Prognosis

Prayer to the Road

by Lesyn Panasiuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Katie Farris & Ilya Kaminsky

Old bicycles stubbornly pull sticks into their wheels,

pull everything into their mouths

like infants still discovering the world.

They often break their own teeth and jaws,

scraping their black, rubber lips

which bleed air.

They tell too many stories. 

They no longer remember where

they meant to wheel us.

They pray to the roads,

endlessly kissing the asphalt like it was

a vast self-portrait

of God,

begging

and begging to stop --

yet, like a vast

self-portrait of God, they cannot stop.

from Poetry Magazine, December 2025

alameda point

 by David Maduli

- after lucille clifton

the estuary opens to the bay

and the bay stretches into the pacific and so

on

therefore and such-and-such,

none of them empty or full

in the way no frame can minimize nor

contain horizon--

yet the ocean can be it, even when sky

and sea are the same late summer gray

they blend together erasing, making

each other. the humpback whale

breaching the slate screen is the only

one who knows the tension between.

here arrive two children winding bikes

on the path to the point passing succulents

and ground squirrels, and three pelicans

follow in spinning dives to slash

down on this estuary guarded

by gurgling sea lions. the children

collecting rocks and examining mussel shells,

millennia in their hands, nod to each other

and laugh

racing childhood to the pier's edge.

from Poem-a-Day, April 14, 2025

Urban Youth

 by Tracy K. Smith

You'd wake me for Saturday cartoons
When you were twelve and I was two.
Hong Kong Phooey, Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids.
In the '70s, everything shone bright as brass

When you were twelve and I was two,
It was always autumn, blue sky, flimsy clouds.
This was the '70s. Every bright day a brass
Trombone slept, leaning in your room.

Autumn-crisp air. Blue skies. Clouds
Of steam clotted the windows near the stove (and
Slept in the trombone kept in your room). You
Wrote a poem about the sea and never forgot it.

Steam clotted the window near the stove
Where Mom stood sometimes staring out.
I forget now what there was to see.
So much now gone was only then beginning.

Mom stood once looking out while you and 
Dad and Mike taught me to ride a two-wheeler.
So much was only then beginning. Should
I have been afraid? The hedges hummed with bees,

But it was you and Dad and Mike teaching me to ride,
Running a long beside me until you didn't have to hold on.
Who was afraid? The hedges thrummed with bees
That only sang. Every happy thing I've known,

You held, or ran alongside not having to hold.

Sai Tells a Ghost Story

 

by Soham Patel (while practicing some version of surya namaskar [aka sun salutations]) One morning in late 2010 I looked out my Pittsburgh apartment window where I always saw a parking lot, the Spinning Plates Artist Lofts, and a euonymus-lined part of the avenue, there at the beginning of Friendship. I knew all the families living on the block because of the rescue dog I live with—we would walk around, routinely meet the people. That early morning and only that morning, I saw out the window a figure of what seemed to be a like four- or five-year-old brown girl riding a bicycle up Friendship Avenue then fade away. How else I know I saw a ghost is the child seemed so composed, happy, and it was way too early in the morning for someone so young to be out riding alone. from Poem-a-Day, October 30, 2024

Mr. Myra Albert Wiggins Recalls Their Arrangement

 by Susan Rich

Maybe it was the bicycle. The way her hips

rose up and up - as if directed straight to heaven - 

Like a Venus. And a banker's daughter - true.

Real original, this girl - a bicycle, a camera,

other newfangled tools. I sent her bolts

of cloth, overalls, and boots - anything to make her squint

her eyes and glance one day towards me - me: Fred

Wiggins of Wiggins bazaar - 123 Commercial Street.

More of a back-up boyfriend, for someone like Myra

her family would say. Everyone knew she was in love

with her own life: bareback rides, opera singing,

and the New York artiste nights. But I expected 

to live a little, too. And so if there were men

of Salem, Toppenish, Seattle, lovely and rich - 

who snickered at our last-season suits

and sequined gowns, who hinted not infrequently - 

that a husband should not be so happy

packing picture frames and mounting

photographs. Christ. They knew nothing.

from Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems

Rochester, New York, July 1989

 by Marie Howe

Early summer evenings, the city kids would ride their bikes down his

   street

no-handed, leaning back in their seats, and bump over the curb

of the empty Red Cross parking lot next door where Joe's car was 

   parked, and

John's white Honda, broken and unregistered...everything blooming,

that darkening in the trees before the sky goes dark: the sweetness of the 

   lilacs

and the grass smell...

And the sound on the front porch steps was wooden and hollow,

and up the narrow stairway stuffy, and dim, and the upper door maybe a little

open - and into the hall and left into his room: someone might be sitting

   there

reading, or sometimes only him, sleeping,

or lying awake, his face turned toward the door,

and he would raise his hand...

And the woman who lived below there played the piano. She was a 

   teacher, and

sometimes we'd hear that stumbling repetition people make when they're

learning a new song, and sometimes she'd play alone - she'd left a note

in his mailbox saying she would play softly for him. And those evenings,

when the sky was sunless but not yet dark, and the birdsong grew loud

   in the trees,

just after supper, when the kids wheeled by silently

or quietly talking from their bikes, when the daylilies closed up

alongside the house,

music would sometimes drift up through the floorboards,

and he might doze or wake a little or sleep,

and whoever was with him might lean back in the chair beside the bed

and not know it was Chopin,

but something soft and pretty -maybe not even hear it,

not really, until it stopped

 - the way you know a scent from a flowering tree once you've passed it.

From the book What the Living Do

Old Habits

 by Joy Sullivan

I wiped out on my bike yesterday. My ex was with me and helped me up and it was romantic for a moment in the way romcoms are romantic when the love interest leaps to the rescue in the wounded aftermath and gently dabs their lover's lip and fixes them up with bandaids and kisses: oh, this might sting a little. Except that this is real life and he spills the hydrogen peroxide all over the couch as he tries to bathe my bloody elbow and my torn up knee and I'm crying but not in a sexy way and we're not lovers anymore but still there's love. Not the fireworks kind, but the familiar and sweaty and honest type that carries you home and slaps a bag of frozen broccoli on your bruised thigh and accidentally calls you baby again - as if you might not notice. As if your heart doesn't thump like the tail of an old hound at the sound of her name.

Earth Appoints a Child to Make the Case

 by Kim Stafford

You guys are all dressed up! Is this your

dinner table? It's really big. Okay, so--

I was down in the woods near my house

minding my own business, but this voice

out of nowhere starts talking, talking to me,

starts teaching me this big word: "non-neg...

non-negosh...negosh...non-negotiable."

That's it. This change that's coming is 

non-negotiable. That's the whole thing

I'm supposed to tell you guys. The voice

said you don't seem to know that. Then it

went away, and I stood there in the trees.

So that's it, okay? The big change is just 

non-negotiable. Now can I get on my bike

and go home? My mom will kill me if I'm late.

from As the Sky Begins to Change

To Mars from Arizona

 by Alberto Rios

Saturday mornings were science fiction—
That is, on that day anything was possible.

We didn’t have to go to the movies for that,
Though when we did, we were introduced to ourselves

More than anything. Ourselves in rockets,
Ourselves taking chances, ourselves speaking to the universe.

Outside of the movies, we were still in them—
Our bikes were our rockets, our submarines, our jets.

But mostly, and first, our bikes were our horses 
In this childhood West, a loyal, red Western Flyer

Taking me everywhere, up and down, fast and slow.
Only later did I understand it was my own legs

That did it all. My own legs and my arms to steer,
My own small, mighty lungs to shout—

A shout that would later become a song.
When they weren’t horses, when my legs were tired,

When the shouts calmed down into just talking,
We bike-riders would sit, and find in that talking 

The gold we had been looking for, though we didn’t know it.
The gold was made of plans for Saturdays still to come—

We each had different ideas, but we all had them,
Speaking them confidently as if we were lions,

Deep-voiced and sure even in that quietude.
What would happen next was far away,

But even as we rested, something in us knew
We would catch the future no matter how fast it ran.

“This is a simple testament to our childhood and adult imaginations both, looking at how time allows us to see the same thing in more than one way. I grew up on the border, literally, but it was never one thing. This poem helps me to understand that the border wasn’t simply about geography, but about the border between today and tomorrow; between what we were doing and what we were going to be doing; the certainty of that hopeful and creative and powerful sensibility—‘I’ was in harmony with the bravado of ‘I am.’”
—Alberto Ríos

from Freud Cycle--Untitled (Freud's Desk & Chair, Study Room 1938

 by Andres Cerpa

At breakfast I feed him my dreams as I arrange

his pills on the table. He is best in the morning,

when his wings lift from the labyrinth,

when he shaves, has an espresso.

Father, I dreamt last night that I was riding

a bicycle down a road in the country,

stones in my pockets to toss at the stray dogs.

I was afraid. The road continued into a fallen

green as the negligent moon took over the sky.

I could hear the dogs off in the distance

as I pedaled towards a clearing where one deer

stood; its proud antlers swayed in the silver 

& I was silent. Silent as I've ever been. Calm.

Then you. You sprinted from the tree line:

openmouthed, unshaven, & took

the deer by its hind legs to drink your fill.

I wanted to run. I did. but ran toward you.

Amsterdam

 

by Safia Elhillo

after Jenny Xie Concentric ripple of the canals, little apartment  at the center point. All June I’ve been in Amsterdam,  vowels softening to liquid in my mouth. Long walks  over the cobblestones in the warmest part  of the afternoon, narrow houses along the water arranged  like crooked teeth. My steps lead me over a ballet  of bridges, precarious choreography of bicycles  and other bodies, the rare car vulgar and roaring  along the too-small street. I count the faces around  that could be my faces, features and shades  from a much older world than this. City I may never  see again, and still my old need to belong. To daughter the possibly Sudanese man at the Chipsy King,  his kind assurance that the dish contains no pork.  My nails soften and split in the cool dry air. An ashen  gray patch on my calf and I am ashamed for hours after,  wetting a finger with saliva to correct it. from Poem-A-Day, May 8, 2023: “I wrote this poem during a month-long residency in Amsterdam during which I attempted a 30/30 (thirty poems in thirty days) with my friend Hala Alyan. It’s written after Jenny Xie’s poem ‘Corfu,’ which is one of my all-time favorite travel poems. So much of my writing practice during that month involved going on long walks and describing to myself what I was noticing, what I was feeling, retraining my poet’s eye to the present day after a long obsession with history, with all my life’s great ruptures. In this poem, the worst thing that happens is that I was, briefly, ashy. And that was as deserving of poetry as anything else that’s happened.” —Safia Elhillo

 Portrait & Shadow

by Andres Cerpa

The curtains sail into the room with the memory of presence behind them

while my father waits in the dark taking apart what is left of his former selves,
        like a pianist, drunk at the keys, playing the same four notes,

letting them ring in the pedals until they haul themselves back into sleep.

He says, I am shadow

& the thief at the seam of his spine slides through the blades of his shoulders,
        hollows the blood, while the dopamine cheapens

like a dollar-store lighter & suddenly, another streak in his Depends emerges as proof.

This too in Arcadia--

the meadow in twilight's last streak of red before he enters the tree line,

which is already waiting, its small footpaths like paintings held in storage,
        their deep palettes so close they strangle to a labyrinth

laced on an MRI-black. The wolf there tears at his tendons,

leaves him always in a fog, & if he emerges it is only to watch but not to enter
        the burning city & self he still loves.

He says, I am the smoke's mascara

& I know he is imagining the Bronx he can never return to,
        where his youth is held in the thin frame of a bicycle

as it cuts through a billow of smoke. The city burned each night & each morning
        he rose to ride through the rubble. The what was,

the father I hold onto to care for his shadow never gets old--

he is kind & clear. He rises each morning & lifts me onto the back of his bicycle,
        he pedals while I glide above the city in wonder.

Jubilate Civitas

 

by Patrick Phillips

I will consider a slice of pizza. For rare among pleasures in Gotham, it is both      exquisite and blessedly cheap. For its warmth is embracing, its smell the      quintessence of hope. For it can be found in all boroughs, every few blocks,      yet never two slices the same. For its makers speak many tongues. For dusting the counter with cornmeal and flour,      without looking down, they pummel and roll out      the dough. For they heap out the still-steaming sauce and, with a      touch of the ladle, paint it in rings like a bull’s-eye,      or a tree-stump, or a thumb. For they smile at each other’s jokes, grasping great      handfuls of cheese. For wiping both hands on an apron, they nod at the      phrase “not too hot,” and start one of a hundred      little clocks in their heads. For their corded forearms reach deep in the oven with      a long-handled paddle, giving each pie, with a flick,      its requisite spin. For heat bubbles and blisters and browns the      miraculous crust. For even in the tiniest shop you can find every style:      sagging with mushrooms and bacon, broccoli and      pineapple, chicken, and sausage, and onion. For time passes slowly awaiting a slice, and reminds us      how sweet it is to be alive at this moment on earth. For it slides to a stop in a little city of shakers, where      with pepper and oregano, garlic and parmesan, we      citizens make it our own. For you can fold it in half like a taco and eat it while      standing or driving, or walking and working your      phone. For I have seen the bearded young men of Brooklyn      sit upright to eat it, riding bicycles through      redlights, at midnight, in the rain. For with each bite the paper plate grows more      translucent with grease, till it glows like stained      glass over the trash can. For it has nourished our children and soothed many      sorrows. For in a time of deceit it is honest and upright,      steadfast and good—beloved and modest and      known. For its commerce makes nobody rich and nobody      poor. For that, to us, it is home. From the book Song of the Closing Doors

For Henry's Bar

 

By Joseph Rios

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

I’m on an errand to find my grandpa. I’m ten
and finding freedom in a sanctioned outing
on my bike through the streets of Clovis, CA.
I roll past Silver’s house and peek into the backyard
of broke drunks holding paper bags around
a barrel fire. One who just came back
from taking a leak is seasoning some carne
they bought with the tallboys across the street
at Numero Uno market. The door chimes when
I walk in and see Artemio’s white mane. His mustache
stretches from his nostrils to his sideburns
and up into his waxed pomp of hair.
My grandma says I’m not supposed to talk to him,
but he always asks how she’s doing.

I don’t see my grandpa anyplace. Art says
he’s around somewhere. I go to Ruby’s
next door. I’m not allowed, but I look in.
I’m hit with a gust of cigarettes and Bud Light.
Half a dozen heads turn my direction. No dice.
I ride down Pollasky with feet out each way.
I swerve left and right, free, for once. I am this
far from the shouting distance of my grandma.
I take to the alley just for kicks and pop a wheelie
behind the appliance shop. I pull up behind Henry’s,
knowing grandpa’s in there. A few other grandpas too.

I don’t knock. I stay on my bike. I realize
I’m not ready to go home and like most men
in this town, grandpa doesn’t want to be found.
I keep riding. I go North toward what’s left
of the railroad tracks. There’s a grey cloud
moving across the sky and I imagine I’m
chasing it, I’m right behind it. I keep riding
until it’s all oleanders and stacked railroad ties.
I never thought I could go this far. I get off
the seat and stand. I glide next to a forgotten
caboose. I imagine I’m the howling train now.
My tires kick dust as they crunch over the dry dry dirt.

Easter Sunday Poem

 

by Tammy Melody Gomez

According to my plan, I did indeed bike to Mama’s home on Easter Sunday / yesterday. We chatted from a distance, she at her front door, me on St. Augustine lawn. Our Easter Sunday family gathering in the year of COVID, without a table or a meal. From my daypack, I brought out an empty shell with cut paper filling: a hand-painted cascarón—confetti egg— and gently placed it one lone one on her porch and stepped away, I won’t mind if you leave it there or maybe just smash it with your shoe. Our hearts have been broken before when prison, money, or unsettled rifts have kept us from our holiday home. Today, by phone, Mama tells me that she forgot about it overnight but now the one lone cascarón is inside her house. “She’s cute,” Mama said. “It’s a she to me.” From the collection Together In A Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic, edited by Alice Quinn (Which just so happens to have a bicycle on the cover.)

Purple-Handed

 WHICH THE PHRASE red-handed, meaning caught in the act, meaning smeared with guilt, out out damned spot, is a bastardization of, given as purple-handed is the result, this time of year, of harvesting mulberries, which Aesop's ant might do with freezer bags or Tupperware, but, being sometimes a grasshopper, I do with my mouth, for that is one of the ways I adore the world, camped out like this beneath my favorite mulberry on cemetery road, aka Elm Street, aka, as of today, Mulberry Street, the wheel of my bike still spinning, as the pendulous black berries almost drop into my hands, smearing them purple and sweet, guilty as charged.

by Ross Gay

From The Book of Delights

This book of "essayettes" - sometimes prose-poems - was chosen as the 2021 Everybody Reads selection by the Multnomah County Library, and will be made available for free to all patrons beginning in early February, 2021.

Street Birds

 By Tyree Daye

We hunt here, I was shown death

at the age of seven, something dead

in my uncle’s hands.

I touched the belly of the black snake

felt its body a muscle tense.

I know nothing

of the baby birds cut

from the sour smell of its stomach,

just as I know nothing

of the sister and brother I watched cut

from the back seat of a flipped over car,

their own little cave.

My uncle tossed the thin-winged birds

into the air; lost

in the overgrown wood forever.

They never flew, never rode

their Huffy bikes from street end

      to street end.

Never raced each other,

never turned a bike into a motorcycle

with an empty orange soda can. The black snake tail

will swirl until the sun goes down,

until the devil comes to get it.

I began to pray

for a new skin for my mother.

Once I cold name 

all the new things.

Mutt puppies, new heads of lettuce,

my uncle’s new car, new red heart.

From River Hymns

Prayer

by Laura Kasichke

The windshield’s dirty, the squirter stuff’s all gone, so

we drive on together into a sun-gray pane of grime
and dust. My son

puts the passenger seat back as far as it will go, closes
his eyes. I crack my window open for a bit
of fresher air. It’s so

incredibly fresh out there.

Rain, over.
Puddles left
in ditches. Black mirrors with our passing 

reflected in them, I suppose, but I’d
have to pull over and kneel down at the side
of the road to know.

The day ahead—

for this, the radio
doesn’t need to be played.
The house we used to live in

still exists
in a snapshot, in which
it yellows in another family’s scrapbook.

And a man on a bicycle
rides beside us
for a long time, very swiftly, until finally

he can’t keep up—

but before he slips
behind us, he salutes us
with his left hand—

a reminder:

that every single second—
that every prisoner on death row—
that every name on every tombstone—

that everywhere we go—
that every day, like this one, will
be like every other, having never been, never

ending. So
thank you. And, oh—
I almost forgot to say it: amen.

Again, a poem from the Poem-a-Day posts by the Academy of American Poets. The author says:

“This prayer of thanksgiving was inspired by exactly the things I put in the poem: the ordinary drive with my son beside me in the passenger seat; the man who rode his bike beside us and saluted us; the weather and the sense of stability and gratitude for stability I had at that moment; the sense that things were going to last and be preserved, if only in memories and snapshots, glimpses of recognition passed between strangers, or between human beings and what felt, at that moment to me, like a benevolent creator who deserved some acknowledgment, even if we are really, all of us, on death row, even if the immortality I felt I got a glimpse of might have been the kind of immortality one achieves having had her name chiseled onto a tombstone. But, I had a lovely glimpse of eternity there, for a minute.”