Today I woke up in my body
and wasn’t that body anymore.
It’s more like my dog—
for the most part obedient,
warming to me
when I slip it goldfish or toast,
but it sheds.
Can’t get past a simple sit,
stay, turn over. House-trained, but not entirely.
poem index
occasions
- Anniversary
- Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month
- Autumn
- Birthdays
- Black History Month
- Breakfast
- Breakups
- Chanukah
- Christmas
- Dinner
- Earth Day
- Easter
- Election Day
- Farewell
- Father's Day
- Fourth of July
- Funerals
- Graduation
- Halloween
- Hispanic Heritage Month
- LGBTQ Pride Month
- Lunch
- Martin Luther King Jr. Day
- Memorial Day
- Mother's Day
- Native American Heritage Month
- New Year's
- September 11
- Spring
- Summer
- Thanksgiving
- Vacations
- Valentine's Day
- Veterans Day
- Weddings
- Winter
- Women's History Month
themes
- Afterlife
- Aging
- Ambition
- America
- American Revolution
- Americana
- Ancestry
- Anger
- Animals
- Anxiety
- Apocalypse
- Audio
- Beauty
- Beginning
- Birds
- Body
- Brothers
- Buildings
- Carpe Diem
- Cats
- Childhood
- Cities
- Clothing
- Cooking
- Creation
- Dance
- Daughters
- Death
- Deception
- Desire
- Despair
- Divorce
- Dogs
- Doubt
- Dreams
- Drinking
- Drugs
- Earth
- Eating
- Economy
- Enemies
- Environment
- Existential
- Family
- Fathers
- Flight
- Flowers
- For Children
- For Mom
- For Teens
- Friendship
- Future
- Gardens
- Gender
- Ghosts
- Gratitude
- Grief
- Gun Violence
- Happiness
- Heartache
- Heroes
- High School
- History
- Home
- Hope
- Humor
- Identity
- Illness
- Immigration
- Infidelity
- Innocence
- Jealousy
- Landscapes
- Language
- LGBTQ
- Loneliness
- Loss
- Love
- Love, Contemporary
- Luck
- Lust
- Marriage
- Math
- Memories
- Migration
- Miracles
- Money
- Mothers
- Mourning
- Movies
- Moving
- Music
- Myth
- National Parks
- Nature
- New York City
- Night
- Nostalgia
- Oblivion
- Oceans
- Old Age
- Pacifism
- Parenting
- Past
- Pastoral
- Patience
- Pets
- Plants
- Politics
- Popular Culture
- Public Domain
- Reading
- Rebellion
- Regret
- Religion
- Romance
- Sadness
- School
- Science
- Self
- Sex
- Silence
- Sisters
- Social Justice
- Sons
- Space
- Spanish
- Spirituality
- Sports
- Storms
- Suburbia
- Survival
- Teaching
- Technology
- Theft
- Thought
- Time
- Tragedy
- Travel
- Turmoil
- Underworld
- Vanity
- Violence
- Visual Art
- War
- Weather
- Work
- Writing
forms
- Abecedarian
- Acrostic
- Anaphora
- Ars Poetica
- Ballad
- Ballade
- Blues Poem
- Bop
- Cento
- Chance Operations
- Cinquain
- Doha
- Dramatic Monologue
- Ekphrastic
- Elegy
- Epic
- Epigram
- Epistle
- Erasure
- Found Poem
- Ghazal
- Haiku
- Limerick
- Ode
- Pantoum
- Prose Poem
- Renga
- Rondeau
- Sapphic
- Sestina
- Sonnet
- Tanka
- Terza Rima
- Triolet
- Villanelle
schools & movements
- Nuyorican Poetry
- Objectivists
- OULIPO
- Poets of Exile
- Romanticism
- New York School
- New Formalism
- Misty Poets
- Modernism
- Modernismo
- Négritude
- San Francisco Renaissance
- Slam/Spoken Word
- Surrealism
- Symbolists
- Translators
- Victorian
- Metaphysical Poet
- Language Poetry
- Confessional Poetry
- Contemporary
- Cowboy Poetry
- Dark Room Collective
- Concrete Poetry
- Conceptual Poetry
- Augustan
- Beat
- Black Arts
- Black Mountain
- Ethnopoetics
- Fireside Poet
- Harlem Renaissance
- Imagism
- Jazz Poetry
- Kanaka Maoli poetry
- Futurism
- Fugitives
- First World War
- Flarf
- Formalism
- Acmeism
poet
Max Ritvo
Texts by this Poet:
Max Ritvo was born on December 19, 1990 in Los Angeles, California. He received a BA from Yale University in 2013 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2016. He is the author of Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions, 2016) and Aeons (Poetry Society of America, 2015), selected by Jean Valentine to receive the 2014 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. In 2012, Ritvo served as an intern at the Academy of American Poets. He passed away on August 23, 2016.
by this poet
poem
2017
2
poem
2015
I touch my palms to the floor
and granite rhinos surge up my arms
and lock in my shoulders.
Water flecks on my back
and my head is shaved
by bladed cream.
But then my time in my body is up
and it’s time for my mind:
It seeks wisdom
and the rhinos fall into a well,
2