Leaves crackle beneath our feet—tinder, kindling—
as we walk by the brook, the crab apple tree
a crimson pointilliste nimbus.
You want to hold each wounded soul in your hands.
Autumn flares. The damaged, the human berserk,
find their way to you. I don’t know how you sleep.
In the Gorgon’s blood, one drop is poison, the other heals.
Fevered autumn, autumn I adore
croons an old song. We stroll the road
scuffing dust. And come upon
a garter snake lying motionless,
its tail, we guess, nicked by a passing car.
When we nudge it, it flips to its back in an agonized S,
squirms, but can’t advance. Its belly gleams.
We edge it into the grass. Do we stop seeing
when we walk away? The brook prattles on.
Home’s far off. Dusk settles, slowly, among leaves.
That’s not mercy, scattering from its hands.
Previously published in The New Yorker. From So Forth: Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 2020). Reprinted with permission from the author.
Rosanna Warren, daughter of Robert Penn Warren, poet and novelist, and Eleanor Clark, prize-winning author of criticism, fiction, and travel books. She earned her BA in painting from Yale University, and an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She taught for one year in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University and then joined the faculty of Boston University, where she taught in the departments of English and Modern Foreign Languages until her departure in 2011. She also taught for several years in several medium-security prisons in Massachusetts and published pamphlets of poems by prisoners. Since 2012 she has been the Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
SWWIM Every Day is proud to present poems by women-identifying poets appearing at Miami Dade College’s 2020 Miami Book Fair.
Miami Dade College’s 2020 Miami Book Fair will host over 200+ authors from all over the world in conversation, in readings, in storytelling, all virtual, all safe, all unique, and all FREE between Nov. 15-22. Reading from their new work will be Diane Louie, Nikky Finney, Heid Erdrich, Jane Hirshfield, Danez Smith, Kazim Ali, John Murillo, Jen Karetnick, Jorie Graham, Kevin Young, among many others. And in conversation with Miami’s own Campbell McGrath will be these poets laureate: Robert Hass, Juan Felipe Herrera, Joy Harjo, among others. Access to Miami Book Fair 2020 is free. For more information and to register please visit MiamiBookFaironline.com. Follow Miami Book Fair @miamibookfair, #MiamiBookFair2020 #MBF2020 #MiamiBookFairOnline.
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