A quick note: Dispatches, fairytale poems, and poems-in-progress are on pause! I’ve pre-scheduled this Friday’s dispatch + The Little Mermaid Part 8 next week. These were both meant for July, but took me much longer to write than anticipated. I’ll be away from writing here until September 14th, navigating rest + some personal things. Please look forward to more essays & poems in mid-September! Thank you all so very much for reading. 🤍
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Dear friends 🍂 🍁 🪶
I hope you’re as safe & well as you can be. :)
I don’t have too much to share about this poem…I love soup & I love the women in my life. This poem is a braid, perhaps: An imagined yet real setting, a supposed ‘I’, and an amalgamation of mothers I both do & don’t know.
Thank you so much for reading, as always. Please take care of yourselves (as well as you’re able). ❤️🩹
With care & gratitude,
Mik
After Calling Him - Edits
After Calling Him - Revised
But how did you stay so calm, Mom? I painted the saucepan with a wooden spoon, spreading boiled tomatoes, squash, sweet potatoes. Steamy pulp simmered with onion, garlic, salt, red pepper. Weren’t you angry? Flavours sharpened each other. I slit a rye loaf open, fist with hole enough for a butter knife handle, steak knives in the dishwasher, lathered in red vegetable gut. My garden’s ripe bodies softened under the heat, sweating out blood-dense juice. The trick, I said, is when you bring a sauce from boil to simmer: never turn the stove off. While you stir flesh, you should still feel the heat in your face from pot, to plate, to teeth, to tongue, to throat, to stomach, to warmth you can give, love you can serve. Aren’t you hungry, too?
Writings & Offerings 🧡
A new issue, hot off the press at The 44 North, featuring my own writing & interviews, but so much more.
A new dispatch, from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Next coming this Friday!
The next installment of my fairytales-in-verse series: “The Little Mermaid” - Part 7. Part 8 Coming Next Week!
For the one-and-only, wonderful Conscious Writers Collective, I write previews for our upcoming guest speakers! Take a peek here.
Full archive here ❤️🔥
Mik, this took me longer to get to than anticipated, but, really, that only made the time with this poem more vibrant. What strikes me every time I read this is the space after 'bodies' on a line all its own (at least when I read it on my laptop). Your language throughout flows so well through the intertwined experiences of rage and calm. From the painted wooden spoon to the 'Steamy pulp' of the first two lines to flavours that 'sharpened' each other, slitting the rye loaf, and a fist with just enough space for the knife...but the steak knives are already in the dishwasher...the rage has been transfigured into a heat that can be used to make beauty like poetry, or soup, or a mother's kind words to her daughter.
Then your speaker gets to the movement that made me genuinely chuckle 'wow' out loud (how I most frequently communicate awe, at least until I get to silence) 'My garden's ripe / bodies... / softened under the heat...' I'm still stammering for the right words to show my appreciation for the way you evoke that pause--space for choices to be made, breaths to be taken, the scent of the soup to remind the speaker of where and with whom she is at that moment.
The voice of your speaker in the second half of the poem is so gentle and warm, but her voice carries a tone of an earned calm, a kind of wisdom, inherent in all those I admire (and hope to be more like someday, haha).
Golly--I could talk about this poem all day, but I'll end with this: You mentioned that behind this supposed 'I' lies an 'amalgamation of mothers [you] both do & don't know.' Well, your attention to these women, including this 'supposed I,' and the witness borne by your poetic precision, honors them, I'm sure, calling a reader like me (a man who is the product of nearly exclusively wise women) into a deeper, more attentive gratitude.
Thank you, as always, and enjoy your rest.