Winter on Zoom
An hour in and not a sliver of gold taints the black sky;
I’m in an online poetry class, pondering waste.
Earnest and undercaffeinated, we hunt both meat and meaning
between the pulsing wingbeats of bees and hunched birds.
My goals are a couplet and a new hard truth.
Another poet’s is to “be true, find out what that means.”
I worry truth is relative - the mind carries only what it will.
We unpack our overweight bags, analyze unnamed yous.
Is you God? Death? Poetry its very self?
We project: it’s Mom. It’s almost always Mom.
Every poem seems to conjure a beloved.
I’m done with love and vanish in the white space.
In one poem, December is the metaphor. Structure lives
only in line breaks and bookended happiness.
Another disquiets nature’s balm:
sunsets on Xanax, sunflowers beheaded.
In grad school, I wrote my thesis on Charles Mee,
who says nothing is original and so borrows liberally.
I’m digging for truth, harnessing debris,
foraging for seeds I’ve never seen before.
Still not dawn, we devour a vast winter harvest.
We are listening, and not one loose crumb is lost.
Edith-Nicole Cameron (she/they) reads, writes, and mothers in Minneapolis. She has an M.A. in Performance Studies from the University of London, Queen Mary, and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her work is featured or forthcoming in elsewhere magazine, Brevity Blog, Literary Mama, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and other journals. For sixteen years, she’s spottily written about food at www.CakeandEdith.com. You can find her more recent ramblings on her Substack: Writing it Out.