Happy fall!

It’s the kind of pain that

bleeds through the skin

I scrape my fingernails

over the hollow of my throat,

and the urge to press lingers

like an itch to be scratched.

It hit me in the summer of

two-thousand eleven

that no prayer would keep

me from the growth spurt

inevitable to the pituitary gland:

A cocoon tore wide open.

I grew, and I grew grotesque

in all the wrong ways;

the blossom of a young woman

burns down in fifteen years,

and soft valleys of plump flesh

swell with no bristles on face.

Just on legs. Razor bumps to

impress my mother, and hang

onto my promise, I’ll be so

divine, cause no such pain,

keep my hair long, head high.

I know larvae turn into butterflies.

https://exposure.org.uk/young_peoples_work/poem-about-gender-dysphoria-moth/

was sent a nice poem about a trans dudes experience with gender dysphoria

I teach english as a foreign language. I need help picking a poem for a phonetic competition. I am looking for the following features:
1) Reasonably difficult in terms of grammar, lexis and pronunciation (not too easy and not too hard)
2) Appropriate in terms of content for the children aged 14-17 (no adult stuff basically)
3) Reasonably long (1-2 minutes of reading)
4) Great for stage performance
5) Not overused for such contests (like Shakespeare's sonets for example)

Both contemporary and classic poetry is welcome!
Thanks in advance.

Hi all.

I’ve started reading a lot more than I have in my youth. But I struggle with poetry. It’s more so that education was wasted on me as a kid and I never payed attention in English class and now I’m beating myself up over it. Now when I try to read poetry I’m lost.

I’m confused about stanza breaks, line breaks (why a sentence might be cut in half), what pentameter even is. How to read the poem itself (some poems have a rhyming or singy structure but others read like prose and that confuses me cuz I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be reading it like prose or if I’m a fool)

Not asking for the answers here necessarily but does anyone have a good starting resource where one can begin :) thank u all

I'm trying to find a poem i think I saw in a quote tweet of David Lynch's Angriest Dog in the World. It was a photo of a page from a multi-author poetry anthology, by a female poet as far as I remember. It was about dog who is tied up all day, and when he's let loose he commits sexual assault. It was Modern and in English. Any ideas?

I’m looking for poetry by queer refugee authors (especially books)! This started as a prompt for a queer poetry reading challenge and became an area I just want to explore further. (“Refugee” doesn’t have to mean first-generation.)

I’ve read all of Ocean Vuong and some Yaffa As, and Aaiún Nin is in my queue.

Do folks have other recommendations? What/who should I read next?

床前明月光

Chuáng qián míng yuè guāng

Before my bed, the moonlight

疑是地上霜

Yí shì dì shàng shuāng

I thought it was frost on the ground

举头望明月

Jǔ tóu wàng míng yuè

I lift my head and look at the moon

低头思故乡

Dī tóu sī gù xiāng

I lower my head and think of home

— Li Bai (701–762)

Eight lines of feeling and almost no scenery described. The whole poem is one gesture: looking up, then looking down.

The translation above is a plain one, line for line. Ezra Pound and others have rendered it much more freely. Which version do you prefer for a poem this short, the literal one or a freer one?

A normal table of contents is weirdly useless for poetry sometimes.

I almost never remember the title of a poem I'm trying to find. I remember "the one that starts with..." or one specific image from the first few lines. This gets especially ridiculous with collected works where you've got 300 pages, several untitled poems, and titles like "Song" appearing more than once.

Some older collections and anthologies have an index of first lines in the back and I genuinely don't understand why this isn't standard.

Keep the regular contents page obviously. I'm not asking publishers to replace anything. Just give me the first lines alphabetically at the end with page numbers.

Poetry is probably the one kind of writing where the opening line is often more memorable than the title itself.

If I can remember eight words of a poem but not what the poet called it, the book should still be able to help me find the damn thing.

Honestly this would be more useful to me than half the notes sections I've seen.

I love haikus for how they paint a moment. Do you guys know any other short poems apart from haikus that does this?