Cutting the Good Rosemary
Michael Mlekoday's poem "Cutting the Good Rosemary" appears in Issue No. 42: Forming One Another.
________
MICHAEL MLEKODAY
CUTTING THE GOOD ROSEMARY
means taking from the bees, the butterflies,
for they know medicine better than us,
so I look for a bush less populated.
Maybe I’m just afraid of getting stung,
my body so removed from its history,
it thinks the bee’s poison a poison. Or
maybe this fear means, secretly,
I want it, the throbbing Freudian kiss
of my ancestors, my allergies
a kind of purgatory meant to prepare me
for becoming animal, again. Either way,
I go to the darker rosemary instead,
in the shade, unbothered by the other
pollinators, and draw the stone arrowhead
I carry on my person at all times,
and take, I think, only what I need.
________
Michael Mlekoday is the author of one collection of poems, The Dead Eat Everything, winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and currently lives in the Putah Creek Watershed of California. They hold an MFA from Indiana University and currently study plants and minds in American literature as a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis. Mlekoday was a co-founding editor of Button Poetry, has served as Poetry Editor of Indiana Review, and is a National Poetry Slam Champion. Recent poems have appeared in The Southampton Review, Third Coast, The Journal, Sonora Review, Hunger Mountain, and other venues, and their work has been translated into Polish.
Read the other poems, stories, and art from Ruminate's Issue 42: Forming One Another.
Photo by Sorin Gheorghita on Unsplash
3 Responses
Nancy Gustafson
Thank you for sharing your lovely poem. I’ll think of it whenever I cut rosemary for a pork loin roast. With every delicious bite of it I will be aware of the sacrifices made so that I can enjoy it.
Charissa Troyer
Very interesting
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The Waking is the online publication of Ruminate Magazine, a reader-supported magazine helping you slow down, read deeply, and live awake. The Waking is interested in reviews, interviews, and short form prose that, as Bernard Cooper says, "magnif[ies] some small aspect of what it means to be human."
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Nina Ward
October 06, 2020
Beautiful soft flowing poetry. It makes me appreciate the rosemary in my herb garden and prompts me to wonder if I, too, take more than I need when harvesting. Thank you for your words.