Tuesday poem #681 : Sarah Wolfson : THE PLANTING

 

 

One bean grew down instead of up. Perhaps I planted it wrong. For weeks, nothing. Then the soil moulded over with white fuzz indistinguishable from perlite. I almost threw it away, but the child said hang on and finally some odd, gnarly tooth-like roots anchored themselves upward into air. Soon enough they understood and latched back downward into soil, becoming rough green sutures across a heavy wound named not knowing. Then the stem appeared. It had been growing underground. Like Persephone, said the child. Her mother’s sadness is the reason we have seasons. The child herself conceived after a spell of grief. Finally, the seedling righted, curling back upward through its own looping cellulose. I thought it would choke, cord wrapped around its neck, which happens in more than a quarter of pregnancies. But this is not an uplifting poem about babies who face adversity and thrive: dumpster babies, rubble babies, dog-mauled babies, raised-by-wolves babies. Not a poem about losses, though we are often caught in the act of loss. In the end, the bean grew up, threading the needle of its selfhood. Leaves appeared, smaller than the rest. It’s a month behind the other shoots and who knows whether it will bear fruit, though some small signs point to yes. But help. Get me out of this poem about hope. I simply wanted to tell you how far a bean will go to bend toward sunlight, looping around itself, rising wrongly, before righting everything, a bona fide green cobra bobbing and weaving, hypnotized, toward some higher power.

 

 

 

 

Sarah Wolfson is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the 2020 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, Geist, Arc, and Prairie Fire. Her work has also been anthologized in Rewilding: Poems for the Environment and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. Originally from Vermont, land also known as Ndakinna, she is a longtime resident of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.  

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #680 : Madelaine Caritas Longman : guzzle III

 

after John Thompson

TELEPATHY WITH GOD reads a sticker on the metro
Thank God I’m an atheist reads another.

Drumheller, Red Earth, Medicine Hat, the Walmart
parking lot: roads breathing fever.

John, you wrote not the destruction of form,
not the praise of the private hallucination.

passion, passive, and pathology grafted
from the same root: to be taken over.

in a backseat i half-slept, cheek pressed to the window;
wheat scraped the white from the sky’s edgeless mind.

there was something in me that wasn’t the world:
i thought that made it self.

 

 

 

 

Madelaine Caritas Longman is the author of The Danger Model (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), which won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Concordia University First Book Prize and was longlisted for the Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in PRISM international, The Ex-Puritan, Vallum, Room, and elsewhere. In 2025, she was awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Literature. She lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #679 : Robin Durnford : Peel

 

 

this whole day I didn’t think
of her, had work to do

fed the cats, ate an apple
played with the seeds

on my tongue I crunched
the bitterness and it echoed

through the hall as if I had punched
a hole through the middle

or thrown the flesh against the wall.
you seemed afraid of me then.

like I might spit a seed at you
or peel your skin

and bite you to the core.

 

 

 

 

Robin Durnford was born in St. John's Newfoundland and grew up on the west coast of the island. She is the author of five books of poetry, including A Lovely Gutting (2012), Fog of the Outport (2013), Half Rock (2016), Gaptoothed (2020), and most recently, At Beckett's Grave (2025). She currently lives in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke) where she teaches poetry and memoir at John Abbott College. “Peel” is from a poetry collection she is currently working on called Aspirations for my Enemy.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan