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By D. A. Powell

I play the egg

and I play the triangle

I play the reed

and I play each angle

I play the lyre

and I play the lute

I play the snare

and I play the flute

I play the licorice stick

and I play the juke

I play the kettle

and I play the uke

who ever thought of the triangle

who ever thought of the clarinet

the castanets the cornet the

discotheque the harmonium

the euphonium marimbas and

maracas harmonicas

tom-toms and tatas

I play the fiddle

and I play the jug

I play the washboard

and the washtub

I play kalimba

and I play the koto

I play the organ

and I play the banjo

I play the fool I play it cool

I play hot and I play pranks

I played your mixtape

forgot to say thanks


Source: Poetry (May 2018)

Poet Bio

Born in Albany, Georgia, D. A. Powell earned an MA at Sonoma State University and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Powell is known for his syntactically inventive, longer eight- or ten-beat lines in poems that are often untitled. As a teacher at Sonoma State, he noticed that most of his students’ poems were written to fit the demands of the page. His experiments with his students in writing on unexpected surfaces (such as candlesticks or rolls of toilet paper) led to his own breakthrough in “subverting the page”: he turned a legal pad sideways and wrote the first poem for Tea. Powell explains that “by pulling the line longer, stretching it into a longer breath, I was giving a little bit more life to some people who had very short lives.” Powell has also taught at Harvard University, Columbia University,…

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