Poem of the Week | June 08, 2026

Donald Platt’s ninth book of poetry, Tender Voyeur, was published by Grid Books in 2025. His eighth book, Swansdown, won the 2022 Off the Grid Poetry Prize. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, he serves as a full professor of English at Purdue University, where he has taught since 2000.

In the last three years, two of his poems have appeared in The Atlantic online, as well as more than fifty other poems in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Diode, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Third Coast, Cimarron Review, Ecotone, Seneca Review, Plume, Laurel Review, Notre Dame Review, Barrow St., PINCH, Action/Spectacle, Allium, Cincinnati Review, Indiana Review, Florida Review, Fence, swamp pink, Tupelo Quarterly, Rattle, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Five Points, Adroit Journal, Southern Review, Iowa Review, Lana Turner, New Criterion, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, and The Nation. One of his poems has been included in The Best American Poetry 2025. Over the years, his poems have also appeared in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, AGNI, BOMB Magazine, Southwest Review, and Tin House, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2000, 2006, and 2015, and in The Pushcart Prize XXVII, XXIX, and XXXVI (the 2003, 2005, and 2012 editions).

“Pretty” by Donald Platt is our Poem of the Week.

***

Pretty

                            Because I can’t walk
without my rollator and because I’m taking an insane
                            amount of painkillers

that can’t stop the pain from breaking through, I distract
                            myself
by watching on YouTube the first title match between Sonny Liston

                            and Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.
before he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. It’s brutal, the way
                            Liston punches

with his 84-inch arm reach. Early on, he connects with a hard right
                            to Ali’s ribs.
That thud echoes throughout the Convention Hall. I feel as if I too

                            have been hit
by Sonny Liston. Electric shock of pain ricochets from inflamed
                            sciatic nerve

down left leg. I’m KO’d, lie flat on my back on our bed.
                            Down for the count
for the last ten days. But Ali hardly staggers, keeps

                            dancing, weaving,
feinting, twisting, ducking, leaning back to avoid those lethal punches
                            that felled Floyd

Patterson in the first rounds of Liston’s last two bouts
                            with that former
world heavyweight champ. And now I know why I’m watching

                            this vicious
boxing match. I want to see how a body can move with a tensile
                            dangerous grace,

sidestep death’s right-left combinations, counterpunch with that
                            lightning
left jab. Ali’s feet have coiled springs that keep him

                            bouncing
backward out of reach. His left glove is a cat’s clawed paw
                            batting

a ball of yarn as it unrolls. He lands four quick punches. Liston shakes
                            them off.
In the third round, Ali cuts Liston’s left cheek, which will require

                            after the fight
eight stitches. When the bell rings for the seventh, Liston doesn’t
                            get off his stool.

Cornerman holds an icepack to his jaw. Doctor uses gauze
                            squares to stanch
his cheek’s bleeding. Trainer claims Liston’s dislocated

                            his left shoulder.
The mauler has gotten mauled. Death forfeits the match by technical
                            knockout.

In the middle of the ring, Clay does his victory shuffle,
                            arms raised
over his head. He’s beaten eight-to-one odds. He’s mobbed

                            by raptor reporters.
He’s boasting, gloating, “I’m the champ of the world! I’m the greatest
                            thing that ever

lived!” One reporter asks for some “poetry” about the fight.
                            Ali doesn’t miss
a beat, “He wanted to go to heaven, so I took him

                            in seven.”
Ali yells, “I am the king of the world! I’m pretty! I am a bad man!”
                            The reporter replies,

“You’re not that pretty . . .” Ali gets pulled away by the mob.
                            He sees his friend
ringside amid the crowd’s pandemonium. He tells the police, “Hey, let

                            that man up here!”
They embrace. Ali declares for the camera, “This is Sam Cooke,
                            the greatest singer

in the world! We two pretty!” Or does he mean that they
                            are too pretty?
Sam Cooke with the bourbon-golden tenor voice. He who a month ago

                            recorded and released
the song that will become his biggest hit—“It’s been too hard
                            livin’, but I’m afraid

to die, ’cause I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky.”
                            Ladies’ man,
Sam Cooke is too pretty. Ten months later, dressed only

                            in a sportscoat
and one shoe, he will be shot in LA by the manager of the $3-a-night
                            Hacienda Motel

after forcing his way into her office at 1 AM, looking for
                            the woman who’d
run from his room. The bullet will pierce his heart. He’ll say

                            in disbelief,
“Lady, you shot me . . .” We are all too pretty to die. I lie
                            beside the nightstand

cluttered with orange plastic bottles of oxycodone, Toradol, Neurontin,
                            cyclobenzaprine,
a half-empty water glass, a half-full glass of amber urine because

                            it’s too painful
to push the rollator to the bathroom. I am king of my nightstand,
                            king of this kingdom of clouds.

***

Author’s Note

Famously, in 1800, Wordsworth declared that poetry’s genesis is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” I’m not buying it. Today, tranquility is a luxury few of us can afford. I wrote “Pretty” under the influence of the painkillers described and while watching YouTube footage of the first title fight between Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston on February 25, 1964, in Miami. No bones about it—I was trying to channel twenty-two-year-old Ali’s energy, in the face of Liston’s brutal attack, to withstand pain from my chronic lumbar deterioration. A few days prior, I had been admitted to the ER. During my eight hours there, doctors plied me with morphine and oxycodone but were unable to alleviate the pain in any appreciable way. Eventually, I was discharged with prescriptions for more drugs. However, I found relief, mostly psychic, only while watching this prize fight over and over. I was struck by the intersection of Ali’s and Sam Cooke’s lives, which has been dramatized in the stellar movie One Night in Miami, directed by Regina King. The poem’s ending came unexpectedly and seemed to place the poet squarely in his proper place, neither dead nor alive, but high on a pharmacopoeia of ineffective painkillers—“king of this kingdom of clouds.”