Susan Grimm
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.
Return to November 2023 Edition
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.
Return to November 2023 Edition