Hi, friends, I've got some news for you. I've got two books coming out in early 2025.

44 poems on being with each other is a poetry-unbound collection with 44 poems and 44 essays.

There's poems from Jericho Brown and Mary Oliver and Lucille Clifton in there.

And I have a collection of my own poems coming out too. It's called Kitchen Hymns.

You can pre-order these wherever you get your books, online bookshops, or even better, your local bookshop.

There's more info at poetry unbound.org. Thanks, friends.

My name is Podrig Otuma, and sometimes when I'm looking at a poem, I try to make sure to look at it as if it is

at least three things. It's partly coming from the life of the poet. It's also a work of art like a

painting or a photograph or a piece of film. And also you get ways within which somehow the

dream scape of the poem is working on me, the reader, as well as maybe the poet themselves, that they are being brought into something that they don't have complete control over.

I like looking at the poem like that, because not every poem has to make perfect sense, because that's the whole point.

Life can be so strange and so complex.

And time can do such peculiar things

that often we need something that doesn't wrap itself up in a neat pole

in order to hold the experience that we have.

That has led to the need for the poem to be written.

Pennsylvania Avenue Southeast by Taylor Johnson.

Bless the boys riding their bikes straight up at midnight, touching, if only briefly holding hands as they cross the light to independence.

Bless them for, from the side the one on the red bike looks like me, his red brown hair loose against the late summer static heat. The boy who was not me, see how I did that, fixes his mouth to say something I will never hear, I love you, or I'm so sad, though more than likely, catch up.

Bless the boy who was me on his bike because he was a witness to my witnessing and did not turn away.

Did not make of me a disappeared, burned thing.

Instead, nodded as boys do.

...