Farrow by Kimberly Johnson

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend May 26, 2015   Farrow   Kimberly Johnson

Full in the fat wallow of me,                            Superfluity             Even to the marrow—   Blood plumping along in a red swell                             Of venules             Blushing my most unabashed   Skinpatches: nosetip, earlobe, wristshallow.  O                            This mother               Is a crush of too-muchness,   A malady of my baffled self awash.                           Accomplished              Finally the days, will I find   My bones I lost, will my sharps and edges                          Hedge this fleshy               Habit I’ve made of excess?   Already my heartracing startles                           In another’s               Twitches, my dinner hiccups   Another’s diaphragm. Already and almost                            I swear I feel               The protein creep of me, cell   By splitting cell, into another’s life.                            This mother-grief                Sorrows not for the heart-close one   I’ll lose from me at my delivery                           But for my own                Soul overboiling, unbound, bound   To a stranger’s groans, undone by his hurts                           And remorses                 To the third and fourth   Generations. What I’m birthing is my own                           Diffusion.                  Never again mere. Never again my own.            Copyright © 2015 by Kimberly Johnson. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I’ve been experimenting with this form, which features almost-rhymes over mixed-line stanzas. I suspect that my thinking formally about size and containment led naturally to this meditation on the way the pregnant body seems so unmanageably excessive.” — Kimberly Johnson   Kimberly Johnson is the author of Uncommon Prayer (Persea Books, 2014) and coeditor of Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale University Press, 2013).  She teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Brigham Young University and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.   Photo credit: Ryan Johnson Photography Most Recent Book by Johnson   Uncommon Prayer (Persea Books, 2014) "My Proteins" by Jane Hirshfield "With Child" by Genevieve Taggard "Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta" by Reetika Vazirani Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038