Rue

After equally many years, I’m starting to worry
that I am missing the point of my life. Was I
meant to be the ovary of a green calyx always
getting fatter? How will I think when I die?

I worry there can be nothing worse than realizing
your life wasn’t what it was meant to be.

I am grateful to many herbalists and historians whose writing and scholarship helped on my ethnobotanical expeditions into the archives.

I could, but when I wanted to, you were nowhere to be found.

I could, but I like you better when I hardly recognize you this way.

I could, but I don’t even think I could.
I could, but I don’t think I will.

A Lee Bontecou Retrospective

he was a blossomed-out nerve of seeing
himself through the ugly eyes of how I had
come to see him and myself for letting
our lives get so Tupperware-fur-molded,

The hardest part
is calling that best friend from high school to make
a lunch date.

with an urgency
that made the young man working the desk
say, “Sir?” with some alarm

The Real Thing
Sir John Mandeville, the great explorer and liar,
claimed

Thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts for an individual artist grant

I-70 Review: “The New Elements” and “Pissy Bitch Middle-Aged Happy”;
Origins: “I Want to Learn How” and “A Natural History of Columbine”;
Poetry Daily: “The Real Thing”;
Poetry International: “Clear and Direct Discourse,” “I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours,” and “A Difficult Woman”;
Rockhurst Review: “I’m Worried About You in the Only Language I Know How” and “A Lee Bontecou Retrospective”;
Southern Indiana Review: “The Unicorn Tapestries”;
Spoon River Review: “Things I Did Today Besides” and “Dear Reader, I’ve Been Preoccupied Lately by My Own Private Business”;
Stirring: “Rue” and “The Bird of Paradise”;
Third Coast: “The Threshold of the Unseen World”;
Tin House: “Hexagenia Limbata”;
Tongue: “A Great Place to Raise Children.”

32 Poems: “Letter Home” and “The Petty Politics of the Thing”;
The Account: “Queen of Barren, Queen of Mean, Queen of Laced with Ire,” “Regarding Silphium, the Birth Control of the Roman Empire for 600 Years, Extincted by Careless Land Management in the Year 200 A.D.” and “Pennyroyal”;
The Collagist: “When We Dead Awaken”;
Crazyhorse: “Poor Crow’s Got Too Much Fight to Live”;
FIELD: “It’s Like She Loves Us and Like She Hates Us”;
Florida Review: “I Want to Know You All”;
Gettysburg Review: “The Real Thing”;
Gulf Coast: “This Is Your Mother Calling”;
Hobart: “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”;
Horsethief: “You Get What You Get

And to the Spring Creek Project at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest for time and space to research.

All of my appreciation to Peter Conners, Ron Martin-Dent, and Kelly Hatton at BOA

Kathryn Nuernberger’s previous books of poetry are The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. Her collection of lyric essays is Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past.

She has received research fellowships from the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life. Other awards include an NEA fellowship and the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the MFA Program at University of Minnesota and lives with her family in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

In Optics Aristotle said yellow
and gray make blue.

seems a lot like
when you have a C-section and they actually take
all of your organs out and put them on the table
for a while, then put them all back in less
an extraneous baby or two.