Ana Portnoy Brimmer
      after Mario Benedetti

I pick two from the low-lying
crisper drawers of my fridge.
Day mists through the window

like citrus drizzle, as if the sun
were also thumbed through,
peeled. It's almost November again—

clementine season.
But honey lingers
on morning light,

and leaves refuse the wardrobe
change, dangerous
uncertainty of weather.

I sit on the couch and open
Benedetti's poem, "Gajos."
It helps to think of the heart

as a clementine. Of its shape
as torn into wedges.
Only one remaining

faithful to the body
that ripens. He says
of the heart that while all

the other gajos suffer,
flee, there is one
that endures, stays

for the panic. The balming.
The recovery while ribs
slacken their grip. I send the poem

to my father back home
in Puerto Rico, as I've grown
accustomed to sharing my feelings

with him through strangers'
words. He responds
that the poem is beautiful.

And the three-dotted snake
of his typing reappears.
¿Tú tienes ese gajo aún?

I feel for the rinds perched
on the couch beside me.
He knows this question

probes a field
long fallow. I leave
the message seen

and unanswered—
place another sliver
in my mouth.
from the book TO LOVE AN ISLAND / YesYes Books
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Dana Levin's Now Do You Know Where You Are Reviewed by Srikanth Reddy

"Now Do You Know Where You Are is a book about many things—Donald Trump, climate grief, the Covid pandemic, the death of a cat—but it's also the diary of a poet's painful passage from not writing to writing again. Levin freely shares the self-doubts, false starts and dead ends of her return to poetry in this unguarded literary experiment. If this sounds emotionally risky and artistically gutsy, it is." 

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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What Sparks Poetry:
Adam Dickinson (St. Catharines, Ontario) on Ecopoetry Now

"My poem responds to dioxin in part by reflecting on the complex history of the chemical as well as my own potential exposure history. I spent a significant portion of my life living and traveling in central and northern Ontario, Canada, never far from pulp and paper mills and their distinctive sulfurous smell and insidious environmental footprint."
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