The Poem Hopes This Message Finds You Well
"Salt" by Matthew Derouin
The poem isn’t sure what to do with its hands.
The poem wonders whether it should rinse
its hair with vinegar, bake a two-tiered lemon cake,
start making its own yogurt. The poem sneaks out
the back door, takes a long drag in the alley.
The poem observes the churning
of ventilators, the tweets unwinding
like crooked fences, the sound of glass
shattering at the capitol. Thousands
of people are dying. Outside,
the seasons twist their kaleidoscope—
gold, white, mint, emerald—
whether or not the poem pays attention.
The poem wants to take a nap.
How can the poem speak now
of inkblot sky on the river’s skin,
wheatfields the color of bone, seawater
wrung from towels, cold sandwiches
unwrapped in ghost woods long ago?
The poem exhales. The poem can’t decide
between a podcast and a guided meditation,
so the poem listens to the wind, the ice
letting go of the branches. Two million
people have died. Maybe the poem
will try again tomorrow. Maybe it will shake
the dust from the braided rug. Maybe
the poem will remember how to sing.
Maybe the poem will skip town, hitch a ride
up north. After all this time, the poem still knows
how to pitch a tent in the dark.
About the author
Sarah Burke is the author of Blueprints, winner of the 2018 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize. Her poems have received the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the James Wright Poetry Prize from Mid-American Review, and the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize from Swamp Pink. She has work published or forthcoming in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ploughshares, Rust & Moth, The Shore, Wildness, and other journals. Burke lives in Pittsburgh and holds an MFA in creative writing and environment from Iowa State University. Visit her online at sarahburke.ink.
About the artist
Matthew Derouin is an artist, musician, and author living in Saint Louis, Missouri. As a former student of philosophy, his work, across all media, is concerned primarily with questions of free will and the search for meaning. One's sense of personal identity is shaped in large part by a person's interpretation of the world, finding pattern, ascribing significance to experiences and events. These then affect one's world view, many of these things happen without awareness of the process or our own biases.