Thrush Poetry Journal
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Susan Grimm 
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How Is It Fitting
​

It’s probable that Olympus is fenced off like Stonehenge or the Glacial 
Grooves which have their own state park. Yet still Eros and Athena
 
show up in people’s poems. Cupid. The wrath of Zeus/Jupiter—​whichever 
name. It makes a good story and everyone loves to have stuff explained
 
by the flawed power of the gods. Yet I have not seen them on Woodward 
disguised as stags tangling their antlers or love-struck, bespangled,
 
and prone on any one’s front porch. There might be peach trees or pears. 
Milkweed pods. Honeysuckle vines. The woman whose hair matches 
 
the pelt of her dog. Sometimes a wind auspicious as autumn comes 
jolting down our asphalt trickery. And the clouds of course are always
 
speaking in orotund terms of portent and desire. But the thrones 
are empty or there are no thrones that don’t end up leg-splayed on the tree 
 
lawn at the end of summer smelling of citronella and buzzing with flies. 




Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.




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