They so liked breastmilk;Joanne fell asleep & leaked,the ants woke up, made the sweet climb.Others were surprised to findacidophilus, Soledad cleansingher inside sex—they made their wayacross her ivory sheets while she napped.Ah, the little guys were rejectedby our sisters. But still, I feelsad that in my new lodgings thereare no more glossy arrowheads to follow,sprinkle with baking powder,make a pretty cayenne path forover the once-food-strewnsill (they scent our past).They can carrytheir groceriesbag-free: & ants shopin the honey cupboard,thirstlike black hair being washedin a sink. Car-waxedblack traffic jam—that’sactual jam, strawberry.Once my curatorial staff.But let them go on strike.Those embodiments of intention;they don’t sit around playingcards; perhaps they neverplay, never horsearound. Hard-to-see-in-the-darkjet numberson the radio dial.Perhaps there is no laughterin their chasm. Serious:but they’re able to stand up on hind legs—a darling trick.I want to give thema little inkwell. A beachball.The number of communal legs aloneexceeds the starsunderground.They could be an orchestra.A single one looks in the mirror& sees a note. A quarter note.So many instinctsmassing as one. If I miss one little lover,do I miss them all?
Las Hormigas
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“Las Hormigas” from SPEECH CRUSH: by Sandra McPherson.
Published by Gunpowder Press on October 2, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Sandra McPherson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Sandra McPherson is the author of Speech Crush (Gunpowder Press, 2022). She has twenty-one prior collections published, including five with Ecco, three with Wesleyan, two with Illinois, one with Ostrakon, and one, The 5150 Poems, with Nine Mile Books. Newer work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Pedestal, Field, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Yale Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Cimarron, Nine Mile Magazine, Crazyhorse, Basalt, Cirque, Palette Poetry, Plume, Red Wheelbarrow, Epoch, Willow Springs, Vox Populi, Whitefish, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Antioch Review. She taught for 23 years at the University of California at Davis and 4 years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her collection of 67 African-American improvisational quilts is housed at the University of California at Davis Design Department. She founded Swan Scythe Press. She is adopted, and is the great-grand-niece of Abby Morton Diaz, Plymouth feminist author and abolitionist. She is the mother of a daughter on the autism spectrum. As a grad student at the University of Washington, she met Henry Carlile in Elizabeth Bishop’s class and they were married for many years. Her second husband was the late Walter Pavlich (Sensational Nightingales: Collected Poems of Walter Pavlich).
"Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing a broken vessel with lines of tree sap and gold, the poems in Sandra McPherson’s new book, Speech Crush, run a vein of intelligence and attention through often harrowing experiences—of deep loss, of scammers and self-immolators, of institutionalization and separations that rival those of Elizabeth Bishop’s 'One Art.' And like the work of Bishop and Leonard Cohen, two poets whose long practice led us to a place whose gates are suffering and wisdom, McPherson’s poems ask us to take into ourselves a wrecked, a transformed beauty. Here it is."
— Jordan Smith, author of Little Black Train and Common Spirits
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