This selection, chosen by guest editor Alexis Ivy, is from Dark Beds by Diana Whitney (June Road Press, 2023).
Medicine
Anything can be medicine.
A jar of spring water,
a dropper of oil, windchimes
at dusk by a door no one enters.
The smallest cat venturing
onto your lap, circling
to make her day bed.
There is medicine in her purr, her paws
kneading your sweater,
medicine in the glow
of the creased old heating pad, borrowed
long ago from your mother.
See, it still works.
Lay it over your belly.
TV can be medicine
if you’re too sore to sleep.
Even the childproof vial
of hard white pills, concocted in a factory
on another continent, rattling
like teeth in the vitamin drawer,
is necessary medicine
for despair.
Stop gritting your jaw,
calculating your failures.
Anything can be medicine.
Open the cap, tip the pearls
into your palm.
Forgive yourself everything.
Swallow.
Diana Whitney writes across genres with a focus on feminism, motherhood, and sexuality. Dark Beds, her second poetry collection, was published by June Road Press in 2023 and named a finalist for the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award. She is also the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves (2021), winner of the Claudia Lewis Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Glamour, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her first book, Wanting It, won the Rubery Book Award, and her third collection, Girl Trouble, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in 2026. Diana has received numerous grants for her writing, including from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Vermont Arts Council, and holds an MFA in poetry from New England College. A feminist activist in her Vermont hometown and beyond, she advocates for survivors of sexual violence and works as a writing coach and as a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.
Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. She is co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). A recent resident of the Sundress Academy for the Arts, she lives in her hometown Boston, working as an advocate for the homeless, and teaching in the PoemWorks community.
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Awesome poetry. How crisp and hard hitting. Unexpected language.
Yes! A beautiful reminder that the things we often take for granted are their own kind of magic.