☀ Today's Poem: "Motherland" Mia Dimina

I met God in a strip mall bowling alley,
where the clouds had lined up like a congregation
in the sky over the bump & tumble of
abandoned road & the children told me
Jesus was born on the back of a hot bus. I
met him through my Polish grandma
as she pressed dolls the size of my thumb
into my hand & my mother wouldn't see.
When Jesus forgot to pick me up from ballet
practice & I waited & cried on a rough green couch
I blamed the Christmas Eve candles that
wound the light into cylinders like Grandma's
hair curlers. Instead of apologies she taught
me how to remember the color red & instead
of forgiveness I learned to count the beads on
a rosary. When she took me for the first
time to that bowling alley with the kids & the clouds
she told me this was my mother's land,
to soak the sky like a cloth & dye it virgin blue.

from the journal MATCHA HOUSE

READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM

"On Memoir, Permission, and the Thorny Terrain of Writing About Family"

"Oftentimes, a reader asks what it’s like to publish a memoir with family members in it. How do you seek permission? What do you do when someone in your family protests your storytelling? Do you write it anyway? In this transmission, the radio delivers the questions as something else: Where is your father? Did he write you into being?"

via LITHUB

READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES

Cover of Jessica E. Johnson's book, Metabolics

What Sparks Poetry:
Jessica E. Johnson on "Of Daylight Saving Time, MyFitnessPal, and Indoor/Outdoor Cats"

"I want to weave in my long, stubborn opposition to hierarchy, noting how eyes trained on hierarchy and classification will miss what is rich, intricate, and inherently valuable in favor of an arbitrary metric. Rich, intricate, valuable: the adjectives call up the sword fern, mahonia, and yellow stream violet that grow under the tall, broad cedar I love and try to listen to, the whole system around her unsuited to commodification."

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