This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from How to Keep Things Alive by Beth Gordon (Split Rock Press 2023).
To the Young Poets
Golden Shovel with Two Ad Campaigns and List of Lipstick Hues
It’s impossible to explain how much everyone smoked: cigarettes
between the fingers of surgeons
& priests & waitresses: our mothers smoked in the middle of the day
while on TV a 4-star general
stood on a hill of bodies & John Dean charmed suburban bridge
players. There was no warning:
no one ever asked: forget the movies: the sexy/sticky cocktail
lounges & Don Draper smoking
while panties dropped. Our grandmothers smoked while frying
chicken or on the 1st of May
watering daffodils. Our teachers smoked: the school counselor: the
spinster librarian. I want to be
clear about this: the principal & janitor shared Lucky Strikes in the
parking lot while hazardous
fumes drifted into the cafeteria window where we drank milk from
waxed cartons and into
our stale peanut butter sandwiches. Our fathers walked down main
street: through your
back yard: flicked Marlboro ashes & Marlboro butts into azalea
bushes: our long-term health
on nobody’s mind. Best friends: arms linked around each other’s
waists: beautifully
unaware of our bodies. Cancer everywhere: we never flinched:
packed
in the backseat with cousins: we didn’t inhale. Camel unfiltered:
sweet with
my grandfather’s breath: his jars of old coins: the way he walked five
final steps & the moisture
in his lungs pulled him under: we believed he was the last smoker to
survive the 70’s: the slick &
cynical 80s unimpressed by his nicotine ways. One day the world was
as creamy
as a mushroom cloud: the next day non-smoking sections appeared
like weeds: protective
& unnecessary. Lab-created fruit flavors: lab created poppies:
petroleum-based emollients
on the road ahead: Aunt Janice left behind. Holding her lukewarm
can of PBR & for
good measure: ragged bathrobe: Virginia Slim menthol dangling
from her painted lips:
Strawberry Brook / Red Waterlily / Coral Raincloud / Plum Storm /
Rainy Rose /Sip of Pink.
Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother in Asheville, NC. She is the author of Morning Walk with Dead Possum, Breakfast and Parallel Universe (Animal Heart Press), Particularly Dangerous Situation (Clare Songbirds Publishing), This Small Machine of Prayer (Kelsay Books), The Water Cycle (Variant Literature), How to Keep Things Alive (Split Rock Press), and Crone (Louisiana Literature). Beth is Managing Editor of Feral, and Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press and Femme Salve Books.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief of beestung, Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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