☀ Today's Poem: "Foxfire" Todd Davis

July 16, 2022

In the valley, where corn and beans grow in rows
mapped by GPS, farmers feed cows and hogs tetracycline

and testosterone. After butchering them in dark tin buildings,
they slop the remains to the survivors so the animals, shoulder-

to-shoulder, eat their own kind. At night, because of the lights
the townspeople burn on their porches or hang from posts

to comfort themselves, only the brightest stars are woven
into the black. The heat of summer lasts too long,

and the boy who lives on the mountain is raised from the sweat
of his bed to look down on the town's spectral glow.

He can't hear the corn-leaves rustle when the breeze
from the poisoned river swells, but he smells the paper mill

and thinks about swimming in what pours from its pipes,
the carp he fishes for that turn on their sides.

Where a fire scorched the dirt the year he was born
huckleberries grow on a talus slope near the peak.

To escape the heat, he climbs to the field in the dark and stands
on the biggest rock, stretching arms like an egret.

Flight's a kind of forgiveness, and here fireflies blink
mercifully among berry branches, miniature lamplighters

finishing their rounds for the night. They rise up and drift
about his head, landing on arms and legs, gloving fingers

in a green luminescence. As if he were a rotting log in a swamp,
laced with fungus that pulses like a star, he joins the milk-wash

of the infinite, a beacon for other heavenly bodies
already falling in bright streaks to the earth.

from the book COFFIN HONEY / Michigan State University Press

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"Foxfire" was composed, in part, out of my longstanding fascination with the fungus that takes this name, the glowing beauty that dazzles the decaying wood where it's found. The degradation of the greater-than-human natural world that begins the poem is the driving force behind "Coffin Honey," but throughout the collection I seek to find places of healing, of physical and spiritual intimacy with the world that sustains our lives.

Todd Davis on "Foxfire"

Safia Elhillo on Girls That Never Die

"This book really fought me, or I fought it, for the first couple of years. I went in with an idea about the book I already wanted it to be, before I'd written it, and tried for years to wrestle the manuscript into the shapes I'd predetermined—and failed spectacularly. There are several versions, a book-length poem, that will never see the light of day. Another challenge was trusting that failure, and believing that the correct version of the book was in there—or out there—somewhere."

via POETS & WRITERS

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Cover of Renee Gladman's Book, Plans for Sentences

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Heather Green on Renee Gladman's Plans for Sentences

"The pathos in these lines might bring up different associations for different readers. For me, there's pathos somehow 'leaking' from these sentences, calling to mind the ways we build or fail to build communities, shelters, and habitable spaces. Taken together, the text and images here dream and draft and gesture toward future creations, lines of many kinds that will create, inhabit, and alter future spaces."

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