It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
I remember sleeping with the Ballad for Metka Krasovec over my head for years in Florida, white cover with people crowded together and their ghosts above their black print selves, pink too like shells, book small enough to hold comfortably in a hand, the ballad singing over my head all night long, while I slept close to the floor, train shaking as if trying to rouse me. I remember shaking Tomaz Salamun’s hand in St. Marks, I’d asked strangers in the dark, where is St. Mark’s, laughing because they’d been to St. Mark’s or wanted to go but couldn’t, or we asked strangers on the street where is Tomaz Salamun reading, and the strangers were poets or lovers of poetry, and pointed us toward St. Marks, their arms raised like parentheses, like waves, but it was almost over, and this was clear when we arrived, and everyone stood in one of many little circles, a large medieval door shut. It was over. Dejected, I climbed stairs to another floor, down a hall, a restroom where I stood in front of the glass examining my face, my newly shorn hair, and Teresa ran in, Hurry, Hurry, she cried. Simen is holding Tomaz Salamun hostage downstairs. Simen said he can’t leave until he meets you. She loves you, Simen said to Tomaz Salamun, as if this would convince him to stay until I ran out the bathroom door, down the stairs, into the vast hall to find Simen from Sweden by way of Norway who doesn’t even like people all that much, holding Tomaz Salamun hostage for me because I’d said I loved him. Like the cold spark in a violet on a winter sill, alive and unexpected. I remember my hand in Tomaz Salamun’s, like a hand but also like bread rising around my hand, warm, tremendously comforting, Who are you, he asked, who are you?
Kelle Groom is the author of four poetry collections, Underwater City, Luckily, Five Kingdoms, and Spill; a memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, a B&N Discover selection and New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice; and How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays (Tupelo Press, October 2023). An NEA Fellow, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, and winner of two Florida Book Awards, Groom’s work also appears in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She is currently director of communications and foundation relations at Atlantic Center for the Arts, an international artists-in-residence facility in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
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i remember this one. loved it then, love it now :)
So good, Kelle!