Hello, blog readers, and welcome to another installment of Pick-a-Poem. Each week on Wednesday we feature a new poem from someone you may not have heard of yet. We do this in the hopes that you discover a new poet or, at the very least, have a bit of poetry injected into your day. We find our featured poems at Poetry Daily, which is a great site that offers a wide variety of poems each day. This week we feature the poem entitled Vulnerability says, which is written by Rusty Morrison.
According to her bio page on Poetry Daily, Rusty Morrison is the author of four different collections of poetry: the true keeps calm biding its story, After Urgency, Book of the Given, and Wethering. the true keeps calm biding its story, published in 2008, won the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award and the DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America. Her other collections won prizes as well. Her poems have appeared in the Norton Postmodern American Poetry 2nd Edition, The Arcadia Project: Postmodern Pastoral, and elsewhere. She has been co-publisher of Omnidawn since 2001.
Vulnerability says, by Rusty Morrison
the silhouette of pines against midnight skyline
is spiked,
like any longing to escape.Warning: World’s edge shifts
as if with its own sentience.Roll your tongue inside your mouth.
Sensations, not the edges, meet.As if the worst thing you’ve done
is already forgiven—the cool of this windowpane,
the blue of this china cup.Strategy: Not giving it shape, but giving in to the shapes
you’ve become.What should be kept, besides compassion for the vanity
of idea?Only the “coming to” in seeing—
I hope you enjoyed this week’s featured poem. For more of these, click right here!
– Jet Fuel Blog Editor, Mary Egan
