☀ What Sparks Poetry: Nik De Dominic on Teaching Poetry inside Prisons

Some rare bug I tell a couple of friends
the bacteria that causes acne’s been found
on my brand-new bioprosthetic pulmonary valve.
The old real one failed in a department meeting on attendance
policy. I made it back to my office before crumbling
to the floor and keep it in my back pocket that I showed
up.

The new valve is half pig
half plastic. I tell a friend I have acne
of the heart and he says there’s a poem!
He doesn’t know what a poem is.
Okay, fine. But I don’t want to write it.

At almost forty, I’ve moved back in
with my mother. Dogs don’t sweat.
Well, they do, but not like we do.
It’s through the follicle and paw:
that’s the smell, the dog smell.

Janna tells me when she told my mother
about my most recent hospital admit
the third in twelve months they both began to well up
before my mother oh-welled and grabbed the crossword.
She’s just not good with her feelings Janna says.

Me and my mother’s lover argue about Trump
and whether COVID is a hoax. He doesn’t know
anyone who’s died of it, so it can’t be
real. Same I say about a heart failing at thirty-eight.
He’s scared of socialism but can’t define it.
Says he loves his Medicare like poets love death.

I Google why honey won’t go bad:
mostly sugar and things need water
to rot. This new medication
makes everything orange.
Everything orange. No, like everything.
No, but really, everything. Yeah, I get it.
No. My ejaculate is orange.
Oh, wow. Really? That friend.

Dinah knows to push
her nose into my hand
and whine when I’m on Zoom.
The remote spin instructor reminds me
with each wheel’s rotation I am closer
to the end. We keep threatening to bathe the dog but—

Janna and I decide to go to dinner
because it’s been a hard week.
A poet I loved forever drifted forever off to sleep forever.
Forever. We argue whether it was purposeful like it matters.
Was it like a beer and a pill or like a beer and a pill?
You knew her, would she do that?
Bobcat Goldthwait says
he and Robin Williams talked about suicide
every day.
That’s just what comedians do.

Same. This fancy Italian restaurant is packed
with children six feet away six feet away. They babble about their
birthdays.
I want to shake hands and compliment
each parent’s strength to have these
fuckers in the face of climate change
knowing each one will die.
But I am too scared of touch.
Two kids argue about space.

What year were you born?
May 15th she says.
Another says there are clouds
filled with gold and black holes that bend light.

I want to tell her
over my ravioli and across the room
what I heard on Sunday Christian radio:
that grace is grace and like a bloom
things give and give
until they can’t and nothing
is left. I don’t.