Poetry Daily black inkblot logo
Week 33: Pineapple
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
Every time she turns her head
between your ilium & coxal bones,
you feel your water
about to break, afraid
of that balloon-pop
in your pelvis, afraid
break is wholly wrong
for what shifts or tears, slips
& loosens. Bones break.
Hearts, maybe. But the veil
between your body’s end
& her beginning? There’s
no breaking it. Looks like that baby
is about to fall               right out of you,
the women call, holding
tight to what’s already fallen
from inside of them. Fall too,
wholly wrong for the way
a body enters breathing.
Rain falls. Fruits from trees.
But body from body?
There must be more
to describe such cleaving.
Directionless & unfinished.
I’m gonna report you
to the grocery store, a man
yells passing, you stole
one of their watermelons.
How easy to be
so wrong in naming
what you’ve never carried.
She is not a vine-trailing
scrambler yet, spreading
as she clings to soil. For now,
she’s still reaching for the sun
atop a tall palm, still
hardening, bones in her skull
just starting to overlap, preparing
for descent, She’s only
a pineapple, you correct him,
& keep on walking, one
slow bone in front
of the other, unsure
which one of you
is going where or how
to name your joined,
persistent motion.
from the journal THE ACCOUNT
READ ABOUT TODAY'S POEM
Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward
This poem is a part of my forthcoming collection 40 WEEKS, available for preorder with YesYes Books. I wrote a poem for each week of pregnancy with my second child, playing with the fruits and vegetables the baby’s size is compared to weekly. While at times I take inspiration from the objects themselves, the poems aim to highlight the problematic aspects of such comparisons and focus instead on societal taboos of the pregnant body and our continued cultural misrepresentation of, and discomfort with, the more unfiltered sides of motherhood.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach on "Week 33: Pineapple"
Photograph of the black-and-white cover of John Keen's collection, Punks
"On John Keene's Punks"

"Celebrations of the social and erotic lives of queer and Black people; elegies for those lost to AIDS and anti-LGBTQ+ violence; splicings of poetics theory; found-text fragments arranged into grids; and persona poems from the perspective of Black historical figures (some famous, some known only to themselves) are all featured in its pages. Punks’s capaciousness makes it the latest iteration of Keene’s ever-expanding experimental sensibility."

via CHICAGO REVIEW
READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES
Color photograph of a hand holding the anthology, I'll Write Myself Free, featuring poems by incarcerated writers in California
What Sparks Poetry:
Nik De Dominic on Teaching Poetry inside Prisons


"I ask students to define a community they’re members of and to list all the language that’s particular to that community and then write litanies, long poetic lists. Students often draw from previous lives. Jobs. Or from the prison itself. The prison then becomes an object of study, the student’s place within it, and through this study, the prison is a site for critique. This is not to say that students aren’t already critiquing prison; it’s that now that critique has value in this space, the classroom."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
View in browser

You have received this email because you submitted your email address at www.poems.com
If you would like to unsubscribe please click here.

© 2023 Poetry Daily, Poetry Daily, MS 3E4, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030

Design by the Binding Agency