Poem in Your Pocket Day 2025

March 19, 2025

Celebrate Poem in Your Pocket Day on April 24, 2025

Held in the last two weeks of National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day is an international movement that encourages people to centre poetry within their daily interactions.

On PIYP Day, select a poem, carry it with you, and share it with others at schools, bookstores, libraries, parks, workplaces, coffee shops, street corners, and on social media using the hashtag #PocketPoem.

This annual initiative is organized by the Academy of American Poets, celebrated with a free downloadable PDF booklet containing contemporary American and – since the League joined forces in 2016 – Canadian poetry to share.

For your French pocket poem needs, check out the booklet created by La poésie partout for La Journée du poème à porter.

La poésie partout

La Journée du poème à porter

PIYP on Poets.org

Celebrate the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Day collection!

Carol Casey, "Brie"
Cheryl Chen, "God's Love Language is Physical Touch"
Jennifer Bowering Delisle, "In the Wild"
Tawhida Tanya Evanson, "Knees"
Farah Ghafoor, "Admission"
Lorri Neilsen Glenn, "Leaving: Home"
Nancy Issenman, "So Many Moons"
Sneha Subramanian Kanta, "To the Elderly Woman, Knitting"
David Martin, "baby steps"
MayaSpoken, "real love says"
Dr. Micheline Maylor, "Motorcycle, motorcycle"
Jean-Paul Thuot, "Grecian Windflower"
Pujita Verma, "WE BUY GOLD"
Lilah Warren, "forgive me, this is not a love poem"
Jessica Zhao, "Our Yearly Sun Turns Around"

Print the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Collection

Download, print, or share the images and files of the 2025 Poem in Your Pocket Collection.

Brie by Carol Casey I remember how my first brie opened doors, back in the days when cheese was plastic-wrapped floppy slices of orange outfielders waiting for the cheddar to commit them a pop fly from home plate. I remember there was wine, although we weren’t old enough, yet just old enough to revel in a stolen base. The brie was creamy, rich, smooth— as if growing up wasn’t going to be all hard, as if I knew, someday, I’d meet you. A home run, on crackers, with wine, bases loaded.

baby steps by david martin the hard est part is gett ing up the stairs but i will help you to a favour ite seat father led son and now son leads father all at times un steady on their feet

knees by Tawhida Tanya Evanson You will have to beg us on your knees Meet us down here beneath the rubble where we live If you don’t meet us where we are There will be nothing left to fight for You will have to lift us out of this amputation and weeping Otherwise your words will mean nothing You must crawl to stay clean among the clouds my love I am replenishing mud a thousand faithful drone wounds at Rafah You will have to invite us to walk beside you As if there were no heart attack between us You will have to see how everyone saw me fall in love And watched me die online You will have to receive this last living breath over and over Whether you inhale it or not If nothing had been said about our joy and longing You would not have refused our joy and longing And we would still have joy and longing even on our knees But Hamdullah you took them too

Admission by Farah Ghafoor Little brute! Sirening his hungers, clattering stones down the stairs, booming canon to his hollow bowl. And what is that? The floating thing from my mouth – trilling creature of what was my hard voice – and my heart a fruit reversed to flowering. The family cat disregards all this, but don’t all children? Amorphous, tail tall as a blunt sword, the shameless prince and his violent agenda: tormenting the resident parakeets, soaking his feet in my eggs, climbing demurely out of the toilet. I am warned of his attachment: You will leave, so make him love you less. And how I had listened to him those first few nights, motherless and keening, as if I too had suffered so. But later, when I woke him with the hallway switch and made candles of his eyes, I hesitated. Stroking his nape until he waded back into those black unconscious seas, there I became strange to infinity. Look at me now, waiting on his gaze directed to the life beyond the window, colder with each visit. I complain to my friends while cupping a treat under his indifferent jaw, that I can only catch him when he drifts off like a tide of smoke, the soft comma around my hand just letting me through.

forgive me this is not a love poem by Lilah Warren The only beautiful thing. Your smile. Rebellion of a hairbrush left on the duvet. May God send me here when I die; your eyes. Futility of the dawn, futility of the teeth, a morning, ended, a tooth, decomposed. In another life I eat ginger candy and play the cello. In this life I see strangers kissing in their kitchen through the window. The only beautiful thing. There is only one. The heart is a triangle, trigonometry, painfully scraping against angles. The mind is a muscle– you can peel layers away, there’s nothing at the center. Slightly to the left there is a cup of cold tea. A sage-green dress if you’re particular. Beautiful one, I have no time to unpack you. I am grabbing fistfuls of time in my hands like sand; like water. I am a crow and the world is a grain of sand. I am a crow and you are a seed-pearl necklace. Do you remember when I believed in a garden? No, I never told you. Forgive me. Morning, ended. Not without my silent riot. Oh, beautiful. The ink, so dark I want to taste it. Skull, a koi pond. Push me too far, they spill out onto the ground, splutter for air, die. Futility of domestication. You cannot keep a girl in a cage. Keep her in a cool, damp pool at the bottom of a cavern, a tidepool, brimming with ivy to cradle her. There is only one beautiful thing. Oh, forgive me, love, it isn’t you.

God's Love Language is Physical Touch by Cheryl Chen He tells me this on our first date. The candlelight ripples across the skin on his face. He looks a bit like a sunfish, or like a children’s toy that outgrew itself. Sorry I’m late, he says. There was traffic and the roads were indecipherable. I say, No worries. The waiters come and go, each dressed like they are performing at their first violin concert. God pokes at his spaghetti. I nudge his calf with my foot. I say, Hey, I don’t usually date men. God laughs and bounces his knees. He takes back his teeth, blinks kinder eyes, grows gills on his forehead. Better? He asks me. I say, Good sport. We sip at our wine and dine in silence. I confess that my knees hurt. We check in at a hotel down the block and lie on the sofa. The children above our floor flee around their room. I can feel God staring at me. I know this feeling—I am expected to do something. I slow my breath. I ask him what he wants from me. He tells me what I’ve heard three handfuls of times: Hold me. I open myself into a crawlspace. In my arms, he is weeping.

In the Wild by Jennifer Bowering Delisle My children like the sour fruit early crabapples chokecherries all pit and drought. Spitting seeds like the big kids who hork behind the Mac’s and staining teeth the shade of blood. Sometimes I fool myself I can protect them from the packs that howl from just outside the light luring prey, or troops from the taunt that haunts for thirty years its speaker. But regret is not a skill that I can teach, but theirs to learn like whistling, or grief. The fruit is red and free and I think that they believe it, when they call try it, it’s so sweet.

Grecian Windflower by Jean Paul Thuot I stop at the edge of the lake as I have always done in this moment. The heron, there in mid-flight between two breaths, while Mist dances ecstatic across the water’s smooth skin. Just this. Just this. Where does the singing come from all around, speaker and spoken prayer and prayer saying, make this body perfect it is the soil from which I rise springlike, again as I always have

Our Yearly Sun Turns ARound by Jessica Zhao Summer comes today, following a downpour that is cleared off the sidewalk by day-break and a meat pie that is scavenged through by lunch-break. An evil-something emerges from the sky so grandma breaks out her jaded beads and beaded jades and a hundred year old focaccia that steams up the kitchen with a culture of dead yeast, fogging up the windows. The rising smell of burnt hits the ceiling but not high enough to hit the devil in the face or the ground running so it marinates instead, in a seltzer bath of rust and erosion. There goes a saying that earth fosters a siblicide in three steps: One, Birth of honeysuckle. Two, Emergence of sprout, Three, Choking of vine on its humidity. Everything else is just Lather, Rinse, Repeat. But grandma also tells me another story in good faith: That tomorrow, sometime before noon, a warm rain will attack the neighbour’s orange cat, that by then Phaethon would have already driven the sun off course, a mosquito would have already bitten a crater size hole into the rubber tire and I would have already forgotten about my father, his two snakes lying dormant under the porch. By then, not me, not you, not even your mother before, could have predicted that Summer would have ended before the sun, an almond cracking egg yolk could make its way into a final quotidian setting.

Leaving: Home by Lorri Neilsen Glenn And you find yourself at the bottom of the year, watching the snow become rain on a day when the hinge of daylight has begun to open and clouds hide the sun like a blank page hides a story. The snow, rare as a full moon at yuletide, drains into the ditch along the path to the sea, and you slip into something waterproof, open the door to release the dog into the road where she noses the puddling ice, then flings herself on a shrinking mound of white, wriggling with satisfaction. Snow seldom stays now. When was the last time you made a snow angel, felt water slide down your neck, caught the tip of your rogue ski on the track, plowed into a deep bank and lay still, gazing at the boundless fourth wall, loving it for its immensity? When did you start to question the life span of hope, accept that even a stone cannot resist the advances of the swelling tides. What you’ve known as flakes, drifts, powder, crust, sleet, packing snow, graupel, gutter snirt— even the wraith-like fingers sliding across the highway as the blizzard buffets your car—you have known as beauty, as both danger and comfort, part of the family of seasons tumbling you down decades, promising return in their wake. At the shore, geese you thought had gone south swirl between rock shoals, a churn of black and tan and white and brown against the sunless sky, weaving water and air.

real love says by MayaSpoken real love says “you are enough” before you even try to be

Motorcycle, motorcycle by Dr Micheline Maylor. For richard Osler The wasp men of the granite valley buzz-buzz down the highway at dawn, leather crusted, dangerously tilting at blind corners. Belligerent riders wind in their cuffs. My friend is dying, one province over. I wish one of these flying boys would pick me up and take me to the sumptuous mound of heaven at the centre of a brown-eyed Susan, so plump in the autumn sunlight, that I might grasp the petals on the face of death, yellow as my belly in the last days of life. Ephemeral as one yellow insect, yellow as the last sparked colour on the last summer sunset ride.

So Many Moons by Nancy Issenman Another moon and another. So many moons, my grandson says, pointing through the darkened glass, seeing every bright streetlight as a moon. And why not, why not a moon on every corner a sun in every window a whole universe of light

We Buy Gold by Pujita Verma there is a process of melting what you know removing its impurities. forgive ancestral inheritance in exchange for rewritten precedent: selling grandmother’s Nani’s gold at a pawn shop to keep lights on leaving a legacy of women who could not leave. my mother not named in the will, a way birthright can be selective of gender. on another continent, Nani collected precious metals in her closet’s labyrinth called on exit strategy for her daughter: an intergenerational justice. watch whole wars wage for a commodity worth more than its weight in memory. think jhumkis, bangles, maang tikka— a lineage of wedding adornments passed down in ceremony. it takes three years before I locate lexicon, tell my mother. she believes me. we leave customs of culture & candidacy; those teach us fear & retribution as resistant to corrosion. while Nani drifts in the CCU after waiting decade to re-meet grandchild I’m shopping markets of Chandni Chowk passing time until visiting window opens briefly— threads of my new lenghas unravelling. I’d learned Hindi through an app for months before making trip to Delhi her village dialect I still couldn’t dissect without intermediary. all I’d know of her is an untranslation of proximity. how she’d been engaged at eight (age, another theory of relativity). last time I’d see her & I couldn’t articulate goodbye, cycles of reincarnation eclipsing gratitude. at her wake, neighbours tell me how they’d watched her hold me, a baby on the balcony basking in the sunlight’s glory. there is a process of melting what you are told about purity. remember, even love can be an economy of scale. like golden hope, when abundant, will tip everything in your favour.

to the elderly woman knitting in the lunchroom of a senior residence condominium. I won’t know if you completed the knitting, or if it matters if you didn’t. This country won’t give us homes. You always waved to me and I waved back. You showed me the design you were embroidering, I would hold up a grocery bag, sometimes two. There is language exchanged without words in this fleeing scenery nobody will remember. I have sat in places hearing immigrants being blamed for the growing towers. They cannot decipher that these homes aren’t for us. The room you sit in looks like the 60s, as if time has smeared sepia on unlit corridors where sunlight crawls in. Perhaps I remind you of your daughter or a friend you want to reach your arm towards— this country won’t give us time. But we take time out the same way we try to create temporal homes looking out at wrinkling curtains. The years pass faster than we age. Today, let us not grieve. We will converse in spaces of silence to become holier at the touch of day. Who needs to know names for friendship? We will make a miracle of our glistening bodies. You can weave red threads into the fabric and I will write to you— despite leaving the home, despite not wanting to leave, despite an oncoming rainstorm, despite the prospect of snow.

To print postcards, you can use an online service like Vistaprint and upload our designs to a 4.2x5.5 poster template. You'll need to download the image file for the poem you want to print, as well as an image for the back (you can use ours!).

These print services will usually provide options to help you design a postcard, but all you'll need to do is upload the image(s) you've downloaded. You may need to add a second page to include the back of the postcard.

Meet the poets

Carol Casey

Carol Casey lives in Dish With One Spoon Territory, Blyth, Ontario with her husband, thousands of books and a large garden. Her work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Gastropoda, Santa Fe Literary Review, Dust Poetry, antilang, Sublunary Review, Popshot Quarterly and others, including a number of anthologies, most recently, Up Your Ars Poetica (Peters and Driscoll) and Stones Beneath the Surface (Black Mallard Press). She has published her first collection- What Can Happen: family and other raptures of imperfection.

Cheryl Chen

Cheryl Chen is a queer Chinese-Canadian writer in Toronto, Canada. Their work has been recognized by the League of Canadian Poets Jessamy Stursberg Prize, Foyle Young Poets Awards, Scholastic Writing Awards, Eden Mills Young Poets Prize, among others. Their work has been previously published or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Toronto Young Voices Magazine, ARTWIFE Magazine, The Next Generation Volume V, among others. They are the founder and co-editor-in-chief of Peiskos Literary Magazine.

Jennifer Bowering Delisle

Jennifer Bowering Delisle is the author of four books of poetry and creative nonfiction. Her lyric essay collection, Micrographia, won the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize and the Writers' Guild of Alberta Memoir Award. Her new collection of poetry, Stock, is forthcoming with Coach House Press in fall 2025. She lives in Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory.

Tawhida Tanya Evanson

Tawhida Tanya Evanson is a Canadian poet, novelist, artist and Ashiq. Her work blends poetry, orality, music and multimedia around themes of African diasporic identity and Sufi spirituality. Born and based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal she has roots in Antigua, West Indies. Evanson's books include Livre des ailes (French novel, Marchand de feuilles 2023), the award-winning Book of Wings (novel, Véhicule 2021) and two poetry collections. She has an extensive history of vocal performance, audio recordings and films including the acclaimed Afrofuturist concert film CYANO SUN SUITE (2023). Evanson's work has traveled internationally to festivals across Africa, Asia, Australia, UK and Canada. She is recognized for her role as director of the Banff Centre Spoken Word Program and president of the Quebec Writers' Federation. She moonlights as a whirling dervish.

Farah Ghafoor

Farah Ghafoor is the author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, 2025). Selections of her debut won the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, and were finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize and the Far Horizons Award. Her work appears in art exhibitions, magazines, anthologies, and post-secondary course curriculums. Farah resides in Tkaranto (Toronto) where she writes about the intersection of climate change, colonialism, and capitalism.

Lorri Neilsen Glenn

Lorri Neilsen Glenn is the author and contributing editor of fifteen titles of poetry, creative nonfiction and scholarly work, including The Old Moon in Her Arms: Women I Have Known and Been (Nimbus, 2024). Halifax’s first Métis Poet Laureate, she was raised on the prairies and lives in Nova Scotia.

Nancy Issenman

Nancy Issenman is a Jewish, queer writer and artist living on unceded Lekwungen territory, aka Victoria, BC. Nancy has published a chapbook, The Name of Yes, and her poems have appeared or will appear in various publications: Room Magazine, Lilac Arch Press, Sea and Cedar Magazine, Scrivener Creative Review. Her story was published in don’t tell: family secrets (Demeter Press.) A plaque with one of her poems is installed in Alta Lake Park, Whistler BC, after winning the Whistler Poetry Pause prize, 2024.

Sneha Subramanian Kanta

Born in Mumbai, Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a multi-genre writer, academician, and editor residing in the Greater Toronto Area. She is the author of several chapbooks including Ancestral-Wing and Ghost Tracks. Her collection Hiraeth is a finalist for the 2024 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and has been published as a digital book and an audiobook in partnership with Apple Books and Penguin Random House Canada. An award-winning writer, her work has been recognized by several institutions including Ontario Arts Council, GRANTA, Tin House, The Charles Wallace Trust, The Writers' Union of Canada, The Vijay Nambisan Foundation, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Writers' Trust of Canada, and British Council. Her work has been widely anthologized internationally including in The Penguin Book of Indian Poets (ed. Jeet Thayil) published by The Penguin Random House imprint Hamish Hamilton and Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems (ed. Nomi Stone & Luke Hankins) published by Orison Books. She is one of the founding editors of Parentheses Journal.

David Martin

David Martin has published three collections of poems: Tar Swan (NeWest Press, 2018), Kink Bands (NeWest Press, 2023), and Limited Verse, (University of Calgary Press, 2024). His work was recently selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2025 (Biblioasis).

MayaSpoken

MayaSpoken is an award-winning multidisciplinary spoken word artist. She is the author of self-published poetry novel “Warriors in Broad Daylight” and founder of platforms such as Spoken in the City Poetry Slam, Tell 'Em Girl Women’s Spoken Word Showcase, and Loud Black Girls, where local poets are invited to share their stories loudly and without apology. A two-time champion of Ottawa’s largest poetry slam OG500, Maya was also crowned the 2023 Canadian Individual Spoken Word Champion and ranked 4th across the Americas. Her poetry is published internationally in anthologies “De las Periferias a las Fronteras” and “Poesía Y Disidencias” (2024), as well as CBC and “Black Ottawa Scene Magazine”. Through spoken word Maya tells her own story of overcoming to contribute to the urgency of larger conversations surrounding collective liberation and justice for all.

Dr. Micheline Maylor

Dr. Micheline Maylor is a Poet Laureate emerita of Calgary (2016-18). She was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Award for literary contributions to Alberta in 2022. She is a Walrus talker, a TEDX talker, and she a past Calgary Public Library Author in Residence (2016). Her most recent book, The Bad Wife (U of A Press 2021), won the BPAA Robert Kroetsch Award for best book of Alberta poetry and has been translated into Italian La Cattiva Moglie (iQdB). She was short-listed for the Exile Robert Kroetsch award for experimental poetry. She won the Lois Hole Award for Editorial excellence for poetry in Alberta (2019). Her poems have recently been translated into Italian, Farsi, and Chinese.

Jean-Paul Thuot

Jean-Paul Thuot lives on lək̓ʷəŋən First Nations land, known as Vancouver Island British Columbia, where he draws great inspiration from nature and observing humans in all facets of their lives. Writing with vivid imagery and spare language, he seeks to draw attention to the hidden and introspective side of lived experience. His work has been accepted by Marion West, The Brussels Review, Pictura Journal and others.

Pujita Verma

Pujita Verma is an Indo-Canadian poet and illustrator. Her poem “Footnotes for the Toronto Sky” is featured across the Toronto Transit Commission Network, and she was Mississauga’s second Youth Poet Laureate (2018-20). Last year, she won the League of Canadian Poets Broadsheet Contest, a Mississauga Arts Council Award, the Eden Mills Writer's Festival Literary Contest, and was runner-up for the Janice Colbert Poetry Award. Pujita is the Youth Outreach Representative for Antler River Poetry and she works for War Child.

Lilah Warren

Lilah Warren is the first-place winner of the 2024 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize for Canadian youth, senior category.

Jessica Zhao

Jessica Zhao is the first-place winner of the 2024 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize for Canadian youth, junior category.

League of Canadian Poets