☀ Today's Poem: "How to Cook a Wolf" Nathan Xavier Osorio

Today's Headline: "Meet Oluwaseun Olayiwola, the First Fitzcarraldo-Published Poet"

Write for Poetry Daily This April, help us to celebrate National Poetry Month by writing about your favorite poem showcased on Poetry Daily. We'll publish the most interesting responses throughout April, and send a free book to everyone whose work is featured. FIND OUT MORE March 12, 2025 How to Cook a Wolf Nathan Xavier Osorio Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken. -M. F. K. Fisher My mother fell in love with the way you cracked into an urchin. How you kept the blade along its purple skull until it welcomed you anxious to be separated for the first and last time. Listen—from our window we can hear the Southern Pacific fume in the station. The turquoise room in the pleasure dome is only for the long-fingered and bored, so come with me and climb onto the roof. Sometimes, I remember best when I put my back to the warm cinderblock, other times I have to reach my arm across your shoulder to find where you end. Darling, if you find me first on the desert road I strung together with pins of light or in the aqueduct blooming with graffiti, this is where the sweet rot of leaves is coming from, where the colony of urchins swarm beneath the dock, where the twirling blades of the Black Hawk lift your hair. We have been careful not to admit that we have wolves in parts of our home we no longer visit. We have been careful to ignore the infinite snarling of daytime, so come up for breath and forgive me nights you can't sleep. Yes, I will keep my ear to the floorboards and listen closely for the sound of her parts assembling. Her lonesome days are spent at the oceanfront, the place where she drags out her dead. I've brought you a canasta of strawberries, the marble kind of gift from your childhood. These things have been outside your reach until now. from the book QUERIDA / University of Pittsburgh Press READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM Share Tweet Forward This poem is inspired by M.F.K. Fisher’s "How to Cook a Wolf." I was struck by Fisher’s lyrical prose and how she reimagined the form of the “cookbook” as a space where we could have a conversation on hunger and survival during crisis. By borrowing Fisher’s title I wanted to invoke her grief-ridden idea of having to eat a beautiful animal like a wolf and let it loom in the background. I wanted to sit with that unsettling energy. Nathan Xavier Osorio on "How to Cook a Wolf" This April, Poetry Daily would like to turn the spotlight on YOU, the loving READER of poetry. What is it that makes you give yourself over to a poem? Which poem in Poetry Daily made you think, surprised you, moved you, or changed your world just a little? Choose any poem from our archive of more than two thousand poems since 2018 and tell us about it in 100 words or so. We’re not expecting a “professional” answer but one from your heart, nothing is too trivial—for a chance to be featured in our groundbreaking What Sparks Poetry series and win a free book! Submissions to: [email protected] (subject: National Poetry Month) by March 24, 2025 "Oluwaseun Olayiwola, the First Fitzcarraldo-Published Poet" "The poems have the flavour of 2020 in their cultural indications. There’s a poem called 'Chlorine,' for example, that has George Floyd’s name in it. There are some poems that mention disease and 'My Mother Raised a Normal Man,' which tries to think about Blackness in a head-on way. But more than those cultural indicators, it was the sense of solitude that really made its way into my work—this profound, and sometimes terrifying, sense of aloneness." via ANOTHER READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES What Sparks Poetry: Gregory Pardlo on Other Arts "I had been working on a poem 'about' my mother (who is also named Marion), and I was struggling to find an approach that would discover something worthwhile about one or both of us while honoring the mystery of difference that separates us. What was driving my interest in this poem? Was it love or some attempt to control my mother, however symbolically? I knew I couldn’t write fairly (forget objectively) about this person whose identity was so important to my own." READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE donate View in browser You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com. If you would like to unsubscribe please click here. © 2025 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030 Design by the Binding Agency

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