Mihaela Moscaliuc
I waddle among pelicans of grief.
They waddle through me,

our throat sacs stapled shut.
I stir the third soup, lovage and thirteen bean,

then bend over wild mushroom broth
to inhale fern and moss.

The beetroot soup, soured with tonic
teased from the skin of wheat,

stings blood red—a compromise
for a night without drinks.

This winter I’m learning how not to die:

With a new emergency generator unboxed,
the book on the rhetoric of science off to press.

Or bleeding from the esophagus in the wake of your wife’s
death to cancer while still mourning the murdered daughter.

Overtranquilized for having raised hell when hours pass
before an aide cleans your bedmate’s feces. You lift a wide-tipped marker to your face

and, without mirror, thicken brows and limn, askew on your cheek, a hooked beak.
An ocean away from me, you are pecking at your breast, dying.

This winter I learn how not to die by making soup—beetroot, mushroom, bean—
and pound the waters with wings and feet to steal enough speed.
from the journal NEW LETTERS 
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
Grief is insatiable. One recent winter, ravenous, it demanded three pots of soup. The chopping, the stirring, the names incanted into the fragrant steam gave mourning a bearable shape. And my recently departed ate and ate. I felt lighter. The vulning pelican shed its mythology of self-wounding and lowered beak to chest not to peck but to caress herself and make feeding others possible.
 
Photographic abstract collage of windows
"Adam O. Davis’s Index of Haunted Houses"

"When considered altogether, the collection’s narrative portrays humanity as having failed itself, damaging the world it inhabits beyond repair and leaving this litany of haunted houses behind like a series of alien structures. More often than not, the poems offer space for uncanny but meditative reflection, ending on a puzzling image that invites the reader to explore the haunted spaces the poems create."

via NEW OHIO REVIEW
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Cover of Jorie Graham's collection, Erosion
What Sparks Poetry:
Devon Walker-Figueroa on Jorie Graham's "Salmon"

"This was a language not so much spoken as felt from deep within … and it made me, all at once, begin to ask myself new questions: what are the choreographies by which our consciousness might move—the patterns in which astonishments congregate? Can the poet witness her own inception? What tempos might our impressions take up—only to shed them later on?"
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
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.

© 2021 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency