The Poetry of Biology

The good news is that I've had a poem accepted for publication in a Canadian literary journal called Phylum. The magazine's mission is to "embrace the natural world around us and the community within it. Each year, the magazine chooses four different species from a phylum within the natural world. These four species will be the names and inspiration for each issue we publish during that year." 

My poem "Arugula," which I read at the Thirsty Word readings last April will be included in Phylum's next issue, which considers the phylum magnoliophyta, which "includes all forms (flowering plants without a woody stem, grasses and grass-like plants, a vast majority of broad-leaved trees, shrubs and vines, and most aquatic plants." Phylum's response time for my submission was about three months. We'll see how long till publication.

Speaking of the natural world, the plan was to get out and camp this fall with my wife, hanging out in our little sixteen-foot Airstream Bambi, riding our bikes, and I reading and writing while my wife used Starlink to work her online business. We did this some last spring, but family commitments have become too much for us to just take off. Therefore, I'll be putting our travel trailer in storage for the winter, and we'll be riding our bikes locally on day trips. Not ideal, but we will find comfort in service and local beauty.

I've been reading poet Carolyn Forché's new book of selected and new poems, Otherworld, and I am enjoying reading about four poems a day, taking my time with the book. It is organized with new poems first, then jumps to her earliest book of poems and progresses chronologically. I like that I could start reading with "this is where she is now," in her 70s, and then to see her development with the selected poems. I wrote the poem below this morning about reading Forché.

Reading Otherwhere

I reside in Otherwhere with Carolyn Forché

in a flat that rents for two-to-four poems a day,

stairs no extra charge. The medicine of her poems

goes down hard sometimes, yet even so

with a taste of bitter betterment—poem-powders

that settle the stomach even as they unsettle,

that balance the imbalance, that dazzle my dizzy.

Good ol’ Doc Forché, diagnostician, apothecary,

dispenser of powders and tinctures, writer

of the materia medica. Anytime any crick or crack,

any stitch or vapor, and there you find me at your door.

It's been a year now since I started writing poetry again, after stepping away from poetry for twenty years. I'm finding great contentment is the writing and in being a part of the literary community here in southeast Iowa. Next Thursday I will read a poem during the Thirsty Word readings at Cafe Paradiso, October 15. I'm looking forward to that, and those of you who are local, I hope you attend. I'll be reading a cat poem, "At Least Three Cats"!

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