“It looked like a tater, it tasted like a tater, it grew like a tater,”
Colin explained. “So I figured it’s a tater.”
“They Thought They Unearthed the World’s Largest Potato,” Washington Post
It always takes heat and moisture,
starts with a coil: time compressed.
An egg is a coil, onion, and rhizome.
I carry, am carried by what I eat: soil—
these adjectives: star anise, garlic
a noun’s plateau—
water: alchemy; yolk: connotation.
Anonymous carried language
in sacs of breath for millennia
until the word-midden springs a root
and an aspen springs a forest.
Loam, mouth of the long-gone,
holds and feeds my tongue, too,
my only athletic muscle.
Adverb: wasabi
fills my sinuses with the holy spirit—
the roots of vows
buried in my jaw sing
when I grind them in sleep
to sand to grist in a pigeon’s belly.
She will feed her young crop milk.
I see her in a coat of snow—
she must not have moved for an hour
while the sky fell and fell
then took flight after
I woke when she shook off
the spell
but was still white—
Oh. A dove.
KAREN HOLMAN is a peer support specialist, collagist, and longtime activist/advocate with an MFA from the University of Iowa living near Detroit. Her chapbook features in New Poets, Short Books, IV. Her poetry has aired on NPR and received several Pushcart nominations. She performed her work in Outrage: The Art of Protest Spoken Word, in Ypsilanti, MI. Her poetry collections were finalists for the St. Lawrence Book Award and Interim’s Test Site Poetry Series.