Happy Wednesday, blog readers, and welcome to another installment of our Pick-a-Poem feature. Each week we bring you a new poem from a poet you may not have heard of before, courtesy of the Poetry Daily website. Poetry Daily is very helpful if you’re looking for some new poetry to read. I’d highly recommend the site! This week we’re featuring Incipient, a poem written by Elizabeth Bradfield.
According to her bio page on Poetry Daily, Elizabeth Bradfield has written two collections of poetry, Approaching Ice (Persea, 2010) and Interpretive Work (Red Hen Press, 2008). In addition, her poetry has been published in The Atlantic, Poetry, Field, Orion, and The New Yorker. This featured poem, Incipient, is from her forthcoming collection, Once Removed, to be published by Persea Books in 2015. She is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.
Incipient, by Elizabeth Bradfield
She buys a maternity shirt. He says
ooh mommy to her chest. She buys
a laptop so she can work from home
when the baby’s born. To test the signal
in the bedroom, they stream porn.
Who will she, my sister, become when it—
future resident of the room stocked
with stuffed animals from our childhood
and games salvaged from our grandmother’s
just-sold-for-a-sad-apartment house—is born?
Across the country, I vow to learn Spanish,
start cooking with turmeric,
write a different kind of book. No one
will help make me new for you, no one
will distract us.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s featured poem. For more of these, check out this link!
– Jet Fuel Blog Editor, Mary Egan
