i.i want a garden. Something modest & need not feed the century.Tomatoes, cuc’s, snap peas, melonfruits. Squash, easily grown.Dip a finger for seedlings in soil. Dip another & surelyas timepass, spring rewraps the skeletal, flogs ass all summer‘till its death red death orange death yellow death crisp death—ice. Milksour mind ‘till light drips thru, finds fleeting soft focuson the lotus of my skin ear nose prick anusperfect holes to hold my sprouting, my 10,000 pisswet wantings—sapphic mutant cliffcrash, wise & potent. i cry so hard the bitter tastesocean, rolls rolls rolls as tides & i turn flipfish, beach whippedat sunset. Nefarious? Infectious! Gutted dolls subtweetn’ scatter—hot nudes, seven wonders, gay scheming, sowing seed. ii.If we’re reflections of god & we’re lonely, then wtf needs truth?Pilate asks a question & the oracle says hello. Mx. Pilate turns sort-of-saint,poltergeisted by gnosis. i want a garden where everything living twistsbeyond me—nouns & pronouns, articles, indefinites, the soila richly satanic. Belief? Ambivalence? Skeletal wrap! Life’s a wheel& wood goes soft, turns wormrot, cast mycelial, only not before…My dreams eavesdrop on poems recited, games of telephonegenerationally renewed. Askers of yore, taste my flora—sassy bitch of fullthroat tease, unseen flowers tonguing toes.The morning of the poem finds me girldick in hand, ready to piss,ready to cum, ready to hang there lambsoft in warmwant.How easily i can love everyone but— . Some days, forsakenof grace & healing, depression being absence of all desire. iii.Learn to be different every damn time. Coffee up, i come to poem,sensing fog & fearing—what if nothing grounds me? So i worldbuildconjunctions, speak motion & scurry to keep up. It’s onlymovement, only politics & fucks. i want you to write me here,sex me here, set bones & dress body, lay bulb for fragments, enjambements, bluesoak dahlias w their lips together ‘n blow.Guys giving eyes all tough & shit, but in a dreamdyke LeslieFeinberg-stopping-hir-motorbike-to-fix-you kinda way. Transsexual sentences flipflop like fish who came before. Bevies of risk.i used to think of gardens as drop root voilà, am more & less foolish now.Love spilt, the bloodmilk is life is poetry.You must stay open & railable—don’t rain forty days like a sullen god but do it some.
the bloodmilk is life is poetry
(after Haley Heynderickx)
Feature Date
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“the bloodmilk is life is poetry.” from RAW & ZERO: by imogen smith.
Published by Nightboat Books on May 5, 2026.
Copyright © 2026 by imogen smith.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
imogen smith is a poet and transsexual. She is the author of stemmy things, also from Nightboat Books. Her writings have appeared in this journal and that, and she is the recipient of fellowships from The Poetry Project and NYFA. imogen loves true punks, hates cops of all denominations, and believes in a free Palestine.
Occupied with trans spirituality, the genocide in Palestine, and the manifold intricacies of queer love and struggle, the poems in imogen smith’s second collection, raw & zero, open up an unabashedly musical incitement. At the heart of this collection lies the tensions between the philosophical and the erotic. Language unspools throughout long form pieces influenced by concrete poetry, as the poet plays with a sense of shape, space, and symbols. With raw & zero, smith charts medical transition, a budding Islamic practice, and civic resistance, felt in the book’s themes of meaning-making, hope, love, lust, identity, and community alongside personal, regional, and global grief.
"raw & zero, in brain, braid & bract, is exemplary proof of the poem as a devotional node: arrayed with pristine consciousness, Kyger-striped like the fiery Costus flower, a double-edged sensuality like the late Sinéad / Shuhada, & the most mentally vasodilational sense of enjambment. Keep it open, imogen. & you too, Reader."
—Aristilde Kirby
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
