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What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In The Poems of Others, invited poets pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Diane Seuss
The turkey's strung up by one pronged foot,
the cord binding it just below the stiff trinity
of toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyes

are in love with it as they are in love with all
dead things that cannot escape being looked at.
It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my

father was there in his black casket and could not
elude our gaze. I was a child so they asked
if I wanted to see him. "Do you want to see him?"

someone asked. Was it my mother? Grandmother?
Some poor woman was stuck with the job.
"He doesn't look like himself," whoever-it-was

added. "They did something strange with his mouth."
As I write this, a large moth flutters against
the window. It presses its fat thorax to the glass.

"No," I said, "I don't want to see him." I don't recall
if I secretly wanted them to open the box for me
but thought that "no" was the correct response,

or if I believed I should want to see him but was
too afraid of what they'd done with his mouth.
I think I assumed that my seeing him would

make things worse for my mother, and she was all
I had. Now I can't get enough of seeing, as if I'm paying
a sort of penance for not seeing then, and so

this turkey, hanged, its small, raw-looking head,
which reminds me of the first fully naked man
I ever saw, when I was a candy striper

at a sort of nursing home, he was a war veteran,
young, burbling crazily, his face and body red
as something scalded. I didn't want to see,

and yet I saw. But the turkey, I am in love with it,
its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegated
feathers, the crook of its unbound foot,

and the glorious wings, archangelic, spread
as if it could take flight, but down,
downward, into the earth.
from the book STILL LIFE WITH TWO DEAD PEACOCKS AND A GIRL / Graywolf Press
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What Sparks Poetry: 
Danielle Badra on Diane Seuss' "Still Life with Turkey"

"All of these cumulative experiences of death and all the ones yet to come and all the deaths that aren't even in my view, they are my beached whale. They are beautiful yet difficult to see up close. The only way I've ever been able to explore is from a safe distance. However, the exploration of death in all of Diane Seuss' poetry collections inspires me to zoom in a little closer, to love 'its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegated / feathers, the crook of its unbound foot.'"
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National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalists

"The National Book Critics Circle announced its 30 finalists in six categories—autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, general nonfiction, and poetry—for the best books of 2021."  The finalists for poetry were B.K. Fischer, Donika Kelly, Rajiv Mohabir, Cheswayo Mphanza and Diane Seuss.

via NBCC
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