A Poem by Rebecca Maillet
Author: Poetry Editor
June 27, 2019
This week, a poem by Rebecca Maillet.
Your Next Choice Can Be Love
A butterfly landed on a pile
of chicken shit in the chicken
yard yesterday—drawn
to its white swirl—the calcium
deposit—the stuff leftover
and glowing from egg-making
the night before. And it pulsed there
for a moment—wings up and down
—the world full of contradictions, and love
exists, and it being one of them. Maybe
it’s not a bad thing—this wanting
to be of each other, to understand, to land
in contradiction, willingly—this wanting
to be at home, implicated, known and unknown
again amidst the dailyness of the world.
——
REBECCA MAILLET is a working class queer poet and flower farmer living in Western Massachusetts. She is a 2015 Tin House Scholar finalist in poetry, and was awarded a residency in poetry at the 2015 Southampton Writer’s Conference in New York. Her poems have appeared in Tin House and Hold: a journal.
