2 Poems by J.C. Todd

After the Death

.

After the death

she listened

to the widower

to the children wild

or silent from grief

to the whine of the pup

that brushed her leg

because the leg he’d brushed

had disappeared

.

after this death

which came after others

which left behind grievers

whose sorrows she had consoled

.

it was the cat weighing in

at 3.7 pounds,

the cat whose eye pads

had lost their fatty tissue

whose hind legs, thinned

and thinning, could not

navigate the stairs

.

it was the cat she stroked

to feel her sorrow welling up

.

Slow Reading,

.

                          like diving deep

into a dumpster—it’s got a shape—

oblong, and a square footage

but its contents are unknown.

Slow reading, like rummaging

with a system, following the words

that soon aren’t words but

music or flash films or

textures your body takes in,

the consciousness of someone else

you’ve absorbed. You could

consider saying like sex

but that’s only a thought, an

expectation you feel obliged

to fulfill. Slow reading’s

like breathing, autonomic,

and thinking this

you feel grateful that the muscles

and the bellows keep going on

below awareness, as reading

draws you down, below

what you know or see.

.

 

J.C. Todd is author of The Damages of Morning (Moonstone Press, 2018), a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award finalist. Other books include What Space This Body (Wind, 2008), two chapbooks and collaborative artist books On Foot/By Hand and FUBAR (Lucia Press, 2018, 2016). Winner of the Rita Dove Poetry Prize, she holds fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Leeway Foundation, Ragdale, Ucross, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Currently a poet with the Dodge Poetry Program, she has taught at Bryn Mawr College and in the MFA Program at Rosemont and holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson.

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