The Poem that Wants to be Written

By: Julianna Baggott

It’s a risen dick, how, so blood-cocked it lolls heavily

toward any other heat,

and the bridesmaids’ taffeta dresses

bustled to giant pink rump bows, a row of them,

that’s the world calling out,

everything bedecked;

the rain, you say, is leaf-ticking; it could be a poem, couldn’t it?

This has nothing to do with words,

or love, for that matter, only an urging

toward release, to lift one’s head from it,

to reel, still ringing, only to cast out

again, a wild eye, the clatter-roll of language,

fever-pitched, your chest a struck-gong --

as the sound lifts, it still shivers. More.

An Apologia for Using Words in Poetry

Words how we fasten and ratchet them to meaning.

Fearless as soldiers, righteous and equine

as queens,

we work them.

I have muscled my way through – written

like a bike messenger through a field of stubbled corn

from word to meaning and back, bell clamped to handlebar.

Let the words crawl and burrow and wheeze in dusty air.

Let them bawl and fume and flower. I’ve spent hours, years

prying their stubborn muscle-sealed shells.

Do infants, do jungles, do wasps

writhe within them?

The words arch and buck and I mistake this wildness

for something other than hatred.

When they hang in a line,

don’t they abandon themselves, a resignation?

Words despise meaning, would shake free for the chance

to be snow, to be flour, to be,

for once, a collection of sounds that works

the tongue and lips, to be not sifted and baked

into this tall proper upright cake.

Arts & Letters

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