Poem of the Week

Heritage

Logan Fry

I put the rat into my mouth and let

The satisfaction of a job

Well done cart me into bliss like plunged

Into a coal mine now cold

Water fills in nature’s reclamation of

The agonized lost here for fuel.

The rat need not know how to swim,

Exploring safely in my thigh.

The flex of meat I imagine comic

From inside as I kick about

In dark that seems a double dark,

Which I confess I fain prepared for,

Wishing it be so, by plucking out

My useless eyes a week ago.

Can the rat see me from inside of me?

Have I forgotten something

That could pry it free? The pickaxe handle

Adored my grasp, and I feel that

I did justice to its grip which held

My grandpap’s fingerprints in black

Smudges in the thirsty veins of ash.

I wish I could have been a tree splintered

After one thousand years alive.

This country was a grand experiment.

The Yale Review · “Heritage” by Logan Fry

how did this poem begin for you?

This poem began, tritely enough, with its first line: an iambic refrain fell into my head while I was running errands and unfurled, once I could sit with it, in one fell stroke. To let the ending be took longer. I had to allow myself to flay the jestful cadence from the poem, to confirm that its rot is not individual, to cement that what is off about America (Americans) is inborn. That its mundanity withstood familiarity to remain resolutely ill-resolved and acrid formally—a mouth silenced with sawdust—confirmed the poem complete.

Logan Fry is the author of Harpo Before the Opus and of poetry recently in, or forthcoming from, Conjunctions, The Rumpus, Image, Fence, Vestiges, the Cleveland Review of Books, and New American Writing.