Tuesday poem #664 : Dani Spinosa : House

 

 

Something happened in this house
when we stopped talking about forges
and started talking about gardens,
started separating the garbage even more than
we were already separating the garbage,
started saving paper to make paper and then
never actually making the paper so that
the piles of paper grew around us
into wildflowers.
Oh, 

and we started learning
which flowers were wild and which were
purchased from the nice shops
and we started learning how to make a garden
get wilder and wilder
but we still went to the nice shops
because this town needs nice shops
and nice flowers and because it’s Tuesday
we need somewhere to go.
Oh, 

and we started to soften,
we all started to soften here,
papa watching the river
nonna watching papa
me driving by, somehow,
through the beach as it grows into something a bit cleaner
that we don’t mind because
perhaps a town or something nicer
will grow.

 

 

Dani Spinosa [photo credit: Jesse Pajuäär] is a poet, scholar, educator, writer, and a web developer. She is a co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press, President of the feminist literary journal, Canthius, the Managing Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, and the author of two books: OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020) and Anarchists in the Academy (U of Alberta Press, 2018). She has published several chapbooks of poetry and several more peer-reviewed journal articles on poetry. She lives in beautiful Wasaga Beach, Ontario.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan