I shouldn’t be doing this the room said. I didn’tknow rooms could do anything much lesstalk about it I said. Well that’s on you the roomsaid but at least you know better now. A personwearing a pink shirt gray jacket and beige pantswas stroking their chin. Another one was wearinga mask. A big part of living is matching whatyou do or say to what else is being done or saidby others. The difficulty is in knowing where todraw the line. For example the philosophical andconceptual mind desires to be included with itscasual counterparts such as the need for rest andidleness. We are living through imperfect timesand clearly deserve all the shit we’ll give ourselves.
The Three Trees at Hudimesnil
Nathan Spoon
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“The Three Trees at Hudimesnil” from The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded by Nathan Spoon.
Published by Nine Mile Arts/Syracuse University Press on June 01, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Nathan Spoon.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Nathan Spoon is an autistic poet with learning disabilities and written expression disorder. The author of The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded (Nine Mile Books, 2025), his poems and essays have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, The Southern Review, and swamp pink, as well as the anthologies The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, Love Is for All of Us: Poems of Tenderness and Belonging from the LGBTQ+ Community and Friends, and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. He is editor of Queerly and an ally of timemedicine.org.
Nathan Spoon brings the complications of consciousness into view. The question that concerns poets with disabilities—real ones as opposed to the metaphorical—is how do we evolve in this light? In the meantime, the poems in The Importance of Being-Feeble Minded have a toughness about them as if perhaps, the epistemology of disability is a street fight. As readers, we like the fight. I’m reminded of Ernesto Cardinal’s utterance: “Life is Subversive.”
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