Miranda Beeson

Tell Me Where I Should Go

Because you know the words & can't get them wrong.

I listened to how his mind split the country into a wound

we could not suture. Not the words—but the silences.

A ball of yarn is attempting to unravel. A bookmark

in memory's eye. The spill of Barolo, tar and roses.

And who among us hasn't been held helpless, before?

I could hardly blame them. Sorry, no more room.

A conflagration of untamed language.

You thought your hunger mattered more than hers.

Whatever tenderness. Wasn't that the point?

Nothing, she says. A stammer of caught breaths.

How the world works, stripping the land of pitiful fruit.

Mornings break against the body I’ve made do with.

We had everything on earth & what did we make?

A cento from the poems of Stefania Gomez, Sasha Pearl, Joshua Bennett, Paisley Rekdal, Paul Tran, Rowan Wilde Riggs, Dan Beachy-Quick, Omotara James, Daniel Halpern, Hermelinda Hernandez-Monjaras, Heidi Williamson

Miranda Beeson is the author of Wildlife (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023), and a recently completed collection of sonnets & This Too. Stay tuned for publication details. She has taught all over including at Poets House in NYC and at Stony Brook University. She also teaches privately, offers editorial services to poets in need, and consults in the IP field. She received her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton, and lives in New York City and the North Fork of Long Island.