What I love: rough cut
onion. Splitting a rooty carrot
late in the kitchen.

Tossing in sprouted
garlic, one blind potato,
the wayward lovage

from our autumn garden.
Salt. Bay. Chicken carcass &
spare drumstick roasting.

Assemblage of what is nearly garbage,
hacked open for flavor— nothing for view.
All at the vestige.

Softening cells
for deep osmosis.

We hoard the rich liquid.


Luminous flare on a darkening window,
the marrow’s deep gold.


unnamed Tess Taylor’s chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Her second book is Work & Days, which Stephen Burt called “our moment’s Georgic.” Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other places. Taylor chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle, is currently the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and was most recently visiting professor of English and creative writing at Whittier College. Taylor has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. Taylor recently was awarded a Fulbright US Scholar Award to study and lecture at Queen’s University Belfast, in Northern Ireland, for six months in 2017.

featured image via Tasty Kitchen.

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