Suzanne Edison

When I Joined the Worm Brigades

Once, I lived months
without light 
like the burrowed earthworms—
alchemists of fallen
leaf and air, their waste
our gold. 
My ambient mood 
was a low moan 
a ferry’s horn in fog.
Crusted and empty 
as work boots 
piled near the back door 
I could not speak to anyone. 
November rains 
entranced the worms.
In my yard I saw three
migrating in rivulets
along a crushed rock path
and I worried 
about our drowning.
In the foreign land 
of my hand they coiled
and stretched, corporeal
question marks. 
I bedded them under
the leafless grape vines 
and struck a bargain:
I’ll keep the moles
at bay for you
and as fodder 
for your future squads
I will you my body.

Back to Issue IX…

Suzanne Edison’s first full length book, Since the House Is Burning, is forthcoming in 2022. Her chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Poetry can be found in Michigan Quarterly Review, JAMA, Whale Road Review, Naugatuck River Review, Scoundrel Time, Mom Egg Review, SWWIM, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Seisma, The Ekphrastic Review, and a few anthologies. She lives in Seattle, is a 2019 Hedgebrook alum, and teaches through the UCSF Chronic Illness Center and at Richard Hugo House.