Page 34 - WTP Vol. IX #9
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JoyCe peseroff
Charlotte’s Web
—In early 2015, the 10,000-entry Oxford Children’s Dictionary dropped around fifty words related to nature—words like fern, willow, and starling — in favor of
terms like broadband and cut and paste.
Maybe Broadband cuddles Wilbur the Pig in Oxford’s new edition of Charlotte’s Web—
a site selling hemp oil listed first by Google if your search omits the word “book”....
With CBD replacing willow as a cure-all— bark chewed or steeped in tea for back pain,
fever, acne, gout— who’ll weep for me
or murder his true love in the sallow garden,
or chip flowy branches on a slate headstone?
In Ostia Antica starlings like rusty hinges
sing that the world needs grease—lines
I cut and pasted from an unfinished poem
about three women
in bikini tops
who sponged the black mosaic of a trireme,
one trilling “Ahh, Niino” into her cell. Aground for eons under sturdy ferns,
the ship was wiped clean as a folder of junk mail while squealing birds oiled their feathers—
then entered the cloud via a single path of light in a fiber optic cable the moment I hit “save.”
Peseroff’s most recent book of poems is Petition. Her fifth, Know Thyself, was designated a “must read” by the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award. She currently writes a poetry column for Arrowsmith Journal and blogs for So I Gave You Quartz at her website joycepeseroff.com.
