Grief
You can’t love a ham. Luckily,
you notice the quilted quality
of its leathery skin looks a lot like
a certain iconic handbag. You can
wear a ham as a handbag.
You can’t love a kohlrabi.
In December, the only thing to eat
is kohlrabi, unless you hop
on its spaceship bulb and whiz
away to kohlrabi space.
You can’t love button mushrooms
while dropping a handful
of their still breathing bodies into
a brown paper bag, but the famous
photographer will take your picture.
You can’t love apples even though
they are there through the winter.
A poem with apples is a recipe
for big, biblical love. An apple,
even small, is a word for love.
You can’t love a city, pudgy
with people because empty of one
person it’s all fucking wrong.
Not Here
Instead, I am a person who is very good
at making pancakes. There is always time
for pancakes. I wear the river well
and the people I love wave before they jump
from the bridge. It is easy to be almost alone
most of the time, even with all of the eye contact.
I wish that I was a country singer or a four year old,
so I could say simply that I hurt and I want
to go home. But here, there’s no blanket fort, no banjo.
In the vegetable light of the corner store, where
watermelons are labeled as red cabbages, I remember
the thing about misery: there’s always a more beautiful way
to say it. A bleeding bag of huckleberries—
a way, with words, to what we love.
A Cat Lady Knows
A cat lady does not mind when a half-frozen banana comes out of the skin and looks like shit. She can imagine, someday, compromising and having a kid. A cat lady takes a stand and just lets her hair go. Walking around with every woman’s worst fear on her head, a cat lady is prone to shed. If a cat lady could be one place other than the place she is, she would be anywhere. Anywhere in her early twenties when she didn’t pay for clothes, poor in a poor, gorgeous hole. Anywhere in the cow barn at the county fair, tucked away in the earth-ripe air. A cat lady would ride whatever she could get her hands on. She’ll find a burger stand on the side of the highway and make a life there.
Black Eyed Susan
A young couple is on the train.
He cuts her arm off at the elbow
with his hand, shaped
like a kindergarten karate chop.
In my life I have crushed
a grasshopper for the joy
of the crunch. There are
words for things like this:
for me, for the boy
and his gorgeous mimicry
of taking his beloved’s limb,
but—of course—the train
is very loud. Of course
there’s an old woman reading
a magazine in Polish
about wildflowers. I wonder which
is her darling, which one
she’d snip a bunch of and say
I really don’t know what I’ll do
with quite so much of you.
Drinking Before Noon in the Holy City
There are holes, like puddles made
more jumpable because you’re sure
they’re endless. Every country song
on the radio is about dirt roads
and being carefree so you start traveling
by horse-drawn carriage.
You go to the girl at the aquarium,
whose wonder at the starfish
is boundless. Day after day
when she points to the dark spot
at its center and says anus,
to a stranger standing on the other side
of the shallow pool, her awe is overwhelming.
You can understand focusing on one
perfect thing. There is a parking garage
built on the old Quaker cemetery. Call it
tithing, everyday you get a ticket to sit
in silence between two yellow lines.
You stare down at the asphalt, waiting
for it to open up.
Tags: autumn giles, ham, love, poetry
Man, the last stanza of “Grief.” And all of “Black Eyed Susan”! *rolls around in poetry*
I love ham. I derive an almost indecent pleasure from eating it, actually.
These were great though.
Hambag.
I don’t think I had even gotten past “you can’t love a ham” before I knew this was something we needed for the site.
I really love these. Especially “Grief” and “A Cat Lady Knows.”
I love these, I love them.
“You can’t love a poem. But you can slice it up and put it on a sandwich, like ham.”
Very excellent poems. Thanks for featuring them, The Toast.
I had to read “kindergarten karate chop” a few times to get that great imagery because my brain kept jumping past the karate+h to leave me with “kindergarten cop”.
these are splendid. really, truly splendid. Thank you for writing your poetry, Autumn.
and this is in no way relevant to the poems themselves, which are terrific, but I saw “ham” and “giles” and “poetry” and thought that someone had written a parody poem about “Farmer Giles of Ham” and Tolkien’s poetry and got really excited.
I learned what a blunderbuss was from that poem.
Oh?? Watch me
This is really really special, though. I loved it. All of it.
This is really really special, though. I loved it. All of it.
Enjoyed this so much! This is the kind of poetry I think I write. 🙂
“I wear the river well / and the people I love wave before they jump / from the bridge” should be too much but it’s exactly right. Brilliant.
"I wear the river well / and the people I love wave before they jump / from the bridge" should be too much but it's exactly right. Brilliant.
I love these. LOVE THEM.
So great!
So great!
These are wonderful. I especially like “A Cat Lady Knows.”
By the way, you can always make a blanket fort. Trust me, making a blanket fort as an adult is every bit as fun as it was when you were a kid. You just have to make it bigger. 🙂
OK, you can’t MAKE love to a ham. But you can totally have platonic love feelings for that ham.
It’s true. Liz Lemon would agree.
OK, you can't MAKE love to a ham. But you can totally have platonic love feelings for that ham.
I love all of this! Beautiful and funny and beautiful.
I love all of this! Beautiful and funny and beautiful.
Such a nice poem! I love ham and I am hungry.. I can still remember this post from 2 years back!