Espalier
By Zoë Ryder White
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
My neighbor, in her green gloves and plastic bunny mask, is training her pear tree—a child, really—to stand straight, arms outstretched. The tree goes two-dimensional with this effort. It’s a training meant to bring beauty; symmetry. Every year as the branches grow, there is more length to tie down. To plant a no-shitting-dogs icon in the square of dirt around what you’d call the tree’s trunk, my neighbor trades the bunny mask for raccoon. The tree is drawn and quartered, though my neighbor is kind; encouraging. Things grow well around her. She binds the tree’s branches to the frame with twisties. She pushes the raccoon mask onto the top of her head so she can see what she’s doing. When the tree is old enough to bear fruit, pears will hang from the frame like a row of pears at the market. When the other neighbor walks by, the one who calls me fucking white whore, will she admire the honey blush around the pears’ dangling bottoms? And will I? My neighbor puts a new mask on. What a collection! This one is the tusked wild boar. Dangerous, delicious. G. says we’re each a little queer in our queer little way. Kurt C. said something similar in the nineties but I’m not sure he meant what she means. If I sit still, I feel what moves through my carotid. A pot of bones boils in the kitchen. I render the spring fat. I lay my hands on me.
Zoë Ryder White’s first full-length collection, The Visible Field, is forthcoming from River River Books in February, 2026. A chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. HYPERSPACE was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2015) and Elsewhere (Sixth Finch Press, 2020) with Nicole Callihan. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family.
1/12-2/14 / Submit to Sonnet Boom: Love Poems for Miami, a poetry contest brought to you by SWWIM, Elevate Miami, and O, Miami. Youth and adult categories. Cash prizes. Free to enter. See Submittable for complete guidelines.
02/12 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Allison Blevins & local poets Carolina Hospital, Nicole Hospital-Medina, and Holly Iglesias / The BBar at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free
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