Pick-a-Poem: Caroline Ebeid

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Hello, blog readers, and welcome to another installment of our Pick-a-Poem feature. I hope you’re all having a lovely week. For new readers, Wednesday is the day we choose a poem to feature here on the blog. This is a chance for you to potentially find work from a new poet, whose work you have never read before. All featured poems come courtesy of Poetry Daily, which is an awesome and helpful site if you’re searching for new and interesting poetry. This week’s featured poem is You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, by Caroline Ebeid.

According to her page on Poetry Daily, Caroline Ebeid has had her work published in journals such as the Kenyon Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, and Poetry. She has received prizes and fellowships from the McNair Scholars Program and the Academy of American Poets. She is currently a fellow at the Stadler Center for Poetry, where she helps edit West Branch. She is also a poetry editor for the online journal Better: Culture & Lit.

You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, by Caroline Ebeid

it was all roadside flowers & grasses
growing over the cities

was made of wilderness & sky
with God washed out of it

was the foreign prayer-word
it was a list of missing persons

was the solid bronze charging
bull on the famous street

was like the Roman method for making bees

was its taken-down carcass
& its bed of apple branches & thyme

was a new anatomy, a beaten hide,
a skeleton sweetening to glowing fluids,

& the bee born out, & the grist of them born
glistening as coins

it was anthem
was the listening,

the way a searchlight listens over a lake
it was the prayer-word out of your mouth
your thousand-noun request
it goes up up to the florescent weather

was an ivory box,

was hurdle & burn, burning through
the infinite, your overbright comet

was made of stones, made of berries & box tops & eggshells
it was like the word having reached the ear

& the words pollinated the dark, there was darkness there,
like the after-hours inside a library

Thanks for reading this week’s featured poem! If you want to read more of these posts, click right here.

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