Poem-a-Day - "One Way or Another" by Maya C. Popa

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March 15, 2022 

One Way or Another

Maya C. Popa

it is you who leaves. So I set out 
to read for signs of imminence, 
the same river twice stepped in.
Morning rises gently on the harbor;
our letters come disguised as life. 
We know the score but fracture 
on fact. We sign a dotted line 
made out of promise—the pipes 
in November clanging on with heat,
the window left at night a little open. 
I love you; then what? Hands 
suddenly alive. I plead with time, 
adamant, remorseless. So we begin 
in earnest; what then? I plead 
with time, adamant, remorseless.
Hands suddenly alive. I love you; 
then what? The pipes in November 
clanging on with heat, the window 
left at night a little open. We sign 
a dotted line made out of promise—
we know the score but fracture 
on fact. Our letters come disguised 
as life; morning rises gently on 
the harbor. So I set out to read 
for signs of imminence, the same 
river twice stepped in. One way 
or another, it is you who leaves.

Copyright © 2022 by Maya C. Popa. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 15, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I am intrigued by poems that double back or otherwise give the impression of a snake swallowing its own tail. A poem’s form can veer in that direction under the pressure of its considerations, contemplating questions for which there exist no easy or obvious answers.”
Maya C. Popa

Maya C. Popa is a Romanian American poet and the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder, forthcoming in 2022 from W. W. Norton. The recipient of prizes from the Poetry Foundation, the Oxford Poetry Society, the Hippocrates Society in London, and the Munster Literary Centre in Cork, Ireland, she is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at New York University.
Wound is the Origin of Wonder
(W. W. Norton, 2022)

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Thanks to Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum: Poems (Knopf, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Listen to a Q&A about Shaughnessy’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.
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