Georgia Popoff's "The Agnostic Acknowledges the Food Chain" and "Name Inconsequential"

A discussion of Georgia Popoff's poems, The Agnostic Acknowledges the Food Chain and Name Inconsequential.

Georgia A. Popoff, of Syracuse, NY, is an educator, arts-in-education specialist, Comstock Review managing editor, Downtown Writer’s Center Workshops Coordinator and faculty member with two poetry collections and coauthored a book for teachers on poetry in the K-12 classroom. Her fourth book, The Agnostic's Book of Common Curiosities, is forthcoming from Tiger Bark Press in 2015.

Participants in the discussion are: Phil Memmer (of course), Executive Director of the Syracuse YMCA Downtown Writer’s Center (DWC); Georgia Popoff, a Community Poet in Syracuse and teacher at the DWC, Stephen Kuusisto, Director of the Syracuse University Honors Program / Professor of Disability Studies for the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies in the School of Education, and me, Bob Herz, founder & editor of Nine Mile Magazine, and publisher-editor of the W.D. Hoffstadt & Sons press.

The poems:

The Agnostic Acknowledges the Food Chain

A wasp flits about the stacked lawn chairs

on the front porch, searching for a hole.

For years, wasps return to these tubes

to hide and sleep, to gather their spoils.

Joy is reading on the glider, early,

before the other humans muss up the day

with their buzzing. She sees the trophy folded

in the clutches of the wasp, electric green

mantis or young grasshopper. Overhead

the birds trade their codes. The wasp stumbles

under its burden, lost and confounded.

The purple finch poised in the privet

observes and grows silent.

In a mere moment, she swoops

under the railing to snatch the bug

from the wasp and zooms

to the telephone wire, swallowing

the meal whole. The wasp is dazed

and exhausted. The cardinals flit to the back

yard. The garbage truck grumbles by.

Name: Inconsequential

(Reuters) - A meteorite streaked across the sky and exploded over central Russia on Friday, raining fireballs over a vast area and causing a shock wave that smashed windows, damaged buildings and injured 1,200 people.

All the clever waiting, this standby life.

A blank face just beyond a terror curtain;

an undefined skittish cloak, thick as oatmeal,

invisible womb for meteors shuttling

in a chaotic tumble, a palpable and futile electricity.

The tenacity to await the Leonids for a year

and then be tricked again, by the fickle

neglect of weather.

Wood is resistant, unlike the boundary of skin.

Wood is inert. Wood holds silent things

together in small boxes and terse cupboards.

What is this notion of future? A stalled execution?

Tattered sweaters and lone sneakers, the lost wife

of a glove, ceiling bulbs dangling frayed strings,

flypaper spotted and brittle with death.

Surely there is a wizened face behind that confounded

curtain? Surely there is a tongue spewing answers.

If not, meteors have no value and trees bend for nothing.

This is my hammer heart pounding courage into wood,

joining strangers, an arranged marriage of right angles,

flaunting a disregard for the open space of love.

Surely these are the corners in which ghosts

whisper tender threats to the living.

Soon we will be together.

Soon you will understand.