The poem tells me:
Drop your pants!
Why should I get naked?
The poem says:
You crave transcendence?
Remove the layers that cover you.
It knows:
I’m not backed against an alley wall.
In our time, the poem says, the aim of art
is rare experience. Let me enter you.
No intruder pins me to the bed.
And yet ...
Oh, I say,
you are a worm growing inside me,
a huge caterpillar causing me to stretch.
I will see the world as cabbage leaves.
What a strange thing!
to be alive
in the cabbage field.
Author’s Footnotes:
1. “The aim of art in our time is ... rare experience.” Richard Kostelanetz in “Avant-Garde” in Claims for Poetry, edited by Donald Hall. The University of Michigan Press, 1982.
2. “What a strange thing! / to be alive / beneath cherry blossoms.” Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827). Translated by Robert Hass.
has poetry published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Thimble, The Bookends Review, Spillway, Comstock Review, Salamander, Schuylkill Journal, and Rattle, among others. Her chapbook, Optimism About Trees (Finishing Line Press), was published in 2011.
She has been a judge for the Santa Clarita Sidewalk Poetry project, and is the co-founder and curator for www.Poetry.LA, a non-profit group that produces videos of poets in performance, interviews, and other poetry-themed programs. A fourth generation Californian, she grows her own vegetables in a garden full of native California plants in Santa Monica.
