by Rebecca Aronson

“Another day in paradise,” my son jokes,
back from school, rooting in the cabinet for popcorn,
crackers, the last squares of my secret chocolate—
dark—I keep hidden behind the plain matzah.
Everything is eroding, I know it, even as he grows,
flourishes, has to duck his head at doorways,
giant feet scuffing the fresh painted walls. He radiates
hope to meet my fear and fury. Love like tree sap,
impossible to scrape free. Someone said children
join you to the world as long as they are in it,
kick you forward even when stillness is sometimes all you
long for. My own mother kept breathing until
minutes after I arrived in her room, then
no more waiting. Was that on purpose?
Only my mother knows, and she’s not telling.
People say all sorts of things I don’t even half believe;
questioning was the family gospel, the only traditional
rite I practice, pass on, the teenager’s
smart mouth both sting and proof.
The trouble with life is death. Or said another way,
undoing is most of what is always happening.
Viewed in this light, crackers are no less pleasing than cake,
water as good as wine. Outside the window, the desert,
xeric and bare at first glance, is a teeming city:
yarrow and fleabane in the ditches,
zigzagging lifelines you’d have to know to look for.

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Rebecca Aronson is the author of three books of poetry: Anchor, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, and Creature, Creature. She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, a Yetzirah poetry fellowship, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee writers conference. She is host of "Bad Mouth," a series of words and music. She lives in Albuquerque, where she teaches writing. See rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com.

by Rebecca Aronson

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

I used to hip-check the jukebox
when I passed it if I didn’t like the song playing;
the music would veer and skip where my curve met
the rounded corner of neon and metal. I took out Peggy Lee’s guttural whine
this way every month until they finally stopped replacing it.
I looked good in my stain-hiding brown waitress uniform,
all camber and coil, shined up with kitchen heat
and magnetic. Who wants to be reminded
magic is illusory when the dove is still flying
out of the hat with such disarming reliability?
I wanted to dance because dancing made a flame
lick at the edges of everything. Here was the secret
to living: what is dull can be polished
to a hot glow with the right friction.
What is lost can be added to the heart’s altar.
Peggy Lee wailed her faith in disappointment
but she was wrong:
even the fryer grease
which hung in the air and followed me
from work to the bar after
once made a hungry boy tell me
I smelled miraculous.

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Rebecca Aronson is the author of Anchor, forthcoming from Orison Books in October, 2022; Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books poetry prize and winner of the 2019 Margaret Randall Book Award from the Albuquerque Museum Foundation; and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize (2007). She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. Her website is rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com.

By Rebecca Aronson

Because I never saw the butcher take down even one skinned rabbit
from the line hung in the window, I did not believe

that somewhere up the road was a crowded hutch
in which they huddled. I did not picture the soft ears

laid flat while a hand groped into the straw-dusted recesses.
Nor did I as I might expect allow the image of steam rising from a shallow white bowl

or those slim flanks braised on a plate with parsley sprigs and spring potatoes. I looked
at the rabbit-shaped bodies suspended on silver hooks

in the clear shelf of the window, the pane wiped clean I guess
each evening, and the sun bright on the glass

in which was reflected the wispy boulevard trees just now blossoming
above the passers-by, and saw across the street three blue awnings

blurred with sky, their flapping
like a flash of something disappearing fast into tall grasses.

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Rebecca Aronson is the author of Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the 2016 Orison Books poetry prize, and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Poetry Prize (2007). She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, and a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholarship to Sewanee. She has poems recently in Beloit Poetry Journal, Plume, Tishman Review, Sugarhouse Review, Baltimore Review, and others. She is co-founder and host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music.