Saturday Poetry – ‘Grow’ by Ruth Ellen Kocher
Saturday Poetry – ‘Grow’ by Ruth Ellen Kocher
This week’s Saturday Poetry brings you the soul-stirring poem titled ‘Grow’ by Ruth Ellen Kocher. Kocher is the author of several poetry collections, including Third Voice (Tupelo Press, 2016), Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, 2014), and Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014). She lives in Colorado.
About this poem, she said “At the end of 2020, I conquered some big life goals and looked forward to my future. But 2021 brought the end of a cherished friendship, then my marriage. In November, I found myself in an ambulance on my way to life-saving surgery for a cervical spinal abscess. I paced my house for two months with an IV bag, feeling hollow. When the onion began to sprout, I measured its progress each day. I couldn’t bring myself to use it. The onion gave me something to look forward to—a small triumph growing on the counter. I wanted to feel triumph again.”
For this edition of Saturday Poetry, we have paired Kocher’s emotive words with mobile art by the talented @linmay191 with the captivating artwork complementing the poem’s essence beautifully, creating a symphony of emotions.
To view the others we have published in this section, go here.
via Poets.org
‘Grow’ by Ruth Ellen Kocher
I have a red onion in a green bowl on my kitchen counter
sprouting a green stalk that began as a little green haystack
bump, a knobby cyst, really, that broke surface, felt like what
I imagine I’m feeling for when I rub my breasts in the shower,
my eyes closed as if water is a blindfold allowing me to feel
within that dark any small homicide growing within me. I can’t
bring myself to use the onion, to gnash its skin, to whack off
its hard-on-gooseneck like I’m suddenly death’s
scythe, death’s brindled pet, death’s dappled good-girl. Maybe,
the onion believes in something, imagines itself still wild,
or holds in its layers the delusion of lilacs or iris or
goldenrod or blueberry or some other rambling growth
redacting my sense of abandon, here, in this too-large house,
a-lone-ly, not like a battle with silence way-of-alone-ness but
a passage. Quiet. Sometimes bright, sometimes dim, so, foreign.
I am a theft waiting to happen, a rotten spell visioning
the onion’s end. Salt. Oil. Softly seared particulate
endings. Oh, onion, circular cycle, joy-halo. Grow.
Please support us
TheAppWhisperer has always had a dual mission: to promote the most talented mobile artists of the day and to support ambitious, inquisitive viewers the world over. As the years pass TheAppWhisperer has gained readers and viewers and found new venues for that exchange.
All this work thrives with the support of our community.
Please consider donating to TheAppWhisperer as this New Year commences because your support helps protect our independence and we can keep delivering the promotion of mobile artists that’s open for everyone around the world. Every contribution, however big or small, is so valuable for our future.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.Her journalism, criticism and commentary have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography, Android Magazine, NikonPro, DPReview, Which Digital Camera and Which Camera. She has lectured internationally on photography and mobile art, served as a juror for international photography awards, and exhibited her own photographic work across the UK, Europe, South Korea and the United States.Alongside her editorial work, Joanne's photographic and postgraduate research explores death, grief, memory, representation and social inequality through contemporary photography, participatory practice and visual research methods, with the longer-term aim of developing this work through doctoral research.Through TheAppWhisperer, she continues to publish independent photography journalism spanning contemporary photographic practice, mobile imaging, photographic apps, computational photography and emerging imaging technologies.Joanne is available for editorial commissions, photography projects, judging, curatorial work, speaking engagements, consultancy and selected collaborations.
