☀ Today's Poem: "Polaroids" Jami Padgett

March 22, 2023

My mother’s failed flower
bed, her dogs’ graves in the moss-
covered grove by the shed.
I can’t think of them
willingly;
the dogs all died
in Biblical ways: horrific
& in passing.
Before we sold the house,
we gathered
on my mother’s bed.
She dug her thumbs
into either side
of my tender spine,
wanted to soothe an ache
I claimed,
she & my brother high.
The popsicle wrappers
he & I slipped behind
the bread box, strings of ants
in the summers;
old polaroids in cheap,
ripping albums,
tucked by clovers & petals
I took from the woods
not realizing they’d one day dry
out. Once, a yard fire
exploded, blew my mother forward
for putting too much gas
on its piled leaves
& made liquid
the skin of her shin.
When she washed the trailer
walls, smoke drizzled down them
like basted fat.
Wasps dying for their nest
in the gutter;
how, when a yellow jacket stung me
on the way home
from the bus stop,
my mother punched it dead
then looked for it
in the gravel.
Empties in the shower.
The roly-poly I loved so much
I made it a house
from a Crackerjack box
& flushed it
when it died; the turtle I found
& kept
beneath my bed
with a leaf to eat,
that my brother threw
from the bowed back
door before he said
I was cruel

from the journal NASHVILLE REVIEW

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

Cover image of Alice Notley's new book, The Speak Angel Series

"The Speak Angel Series - Alice Notley"

"Written from 2013 to 2015 and then revised until 2020, The Speak Angel Series unfolds over six sections and six hundred plus pages. Sitting down to read it feels like tackling Pound’s Cantos, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, or Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias. That last comparison may be the closest because, like Hildegard’s book, The Speak Angel Series is a report of visions and voices, and an account of the conditions for universal salvation."

via FULL STOP

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Cover of Black Warrior Review, 48.1, where Oliver Baez Bendorf's poem was first published

What Sparks Poetry:
Oliver Baez Bendorf on "I Want Biodegradable Sex"

"I am often suggesting to students that when it comes to style, we each have a 'terroir'— a particular flavor made up of the unique places and vocabularies that we have absorbed....But the thing is that terroir is not only style. It is substance. It is not even quite right to say that it is also substance. It is exactly that, substance. It’s the matter we are made of. Terroir is what you write and how you write it. The goal is to write what only you could."

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