Episode 153: Rouged in Dandelion

At the table: Eric Baker, Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)   We made it back from AWP, Slushies! Welcome to any new listeners who have joined our audience since seeing us there. And please join us in welcoming our longtime reader, Eric Baker, to the table.    We’re honored to discuss three poems from Jane Zwart. Once again, we call on Jason’s knowledge of meter and syntax. Here we look at how the recursive syntax, like the memory of the woman in the poem, loops back on itself. The poem’s epigraph places the reader in the cultural moment of the Great Depression and World War II era. Inherited family treasures, like Noritake China, carry memory. The poem echoed, for Dagne, one of Michael Montlack’s poems from Episode 144.   The team is charmed by Zwart’s use of unexpected words like “redoubt” and “hypotenuse” in the second poem. Kathy notes that the poem is successful at conveying sentiment without slipping into the sentimental. She admires the use of the word “startlement” and we realize we’ll be seeing more of it given Ada Limón’s new book of the same name. Jason admires the ending’s gentle touch, which lands on a lilt. In a happy synchronicity, the final poem’s take on springtime’s fickle nature matches our exasperation with the changeable weather. While the poem’s postpositive placement of adjectives sends us back to elementary school grammar, we’re enthralled with how such a simple reversal refreshes our attention. Thanks, as always, for listening!   Author Bio: Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book review for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, and The Nation. Her first collection of poems came out with Orison Books in February 2026.   Author Website: janezwart.com Blue Sky: @janezwart.bsky.social   Inheritance for Janet Knol, 1922 - 2019 I took the china from occupied Japan just as my uncles took seconds of corn. It wasn’t about taste. Or want. When it came to last helpings, the starving children were conveniences, the tureen gratuitous, and if they were about wanting— Janet’s divestments—wanting was nothing so forthright as hunger: my uncles eating for two, themselves and their mother; my wishing that teacups edged in corsage were my cup of tea; or, reared to hoard and abhor waste, my grandma’s berating herself for an ingrate when each windfall knocked the wind from her, the handsome earner she wed, the sons they made. My grandma didn’t dare ask for more, and God knows she didn’t dare ask for less. There were reasons, of course. Some, in an expansive mood, she could name. Hunger, her father, and from that summer so hot no one slept, one extravagance— to drive, windows down, for the relief of a breeze. From her, my dad learned to waste nothing. But on what more to ask of life she left no instructions, so my dad cannot say what he wants for his birthday. Instead, he’ll tell you he has all he needs, as if need were the whole of deserving, as if all the years’ wisdom were getting on with what was. And from him, I learned. Waste nothing; get on with what is. Of the heirlooms, these come in handy. Still, if they were about wanting— Janet’s divestments—they were not about choosing, though, in the end, my grandma had enough of pretending that what she had was enough and asked her sons to brush her hair when it didn’t need brushing and left the corn on her tray. Hold my hand, she told me, then slipped in and out of knowing I held her hand until she slipped out and out and back into her father’s car, its windows were down, and I’ll tell you the breeze forgave everything: hunger and waste, want and wanting things to be otherwise, betrayal, demural, even the mezcal— even the time we sipped it from her Noritake when no other glasses were clean. I steal from children who do not hide their tests with a forearm, and I steal from those who do. I steal the soft redoubt an arm makes around a field of tents, their calculable heights, and I steal the stickman roughing it in a lean-to of unknown hypotenuse. Of my sons’ wonder, I’m the chief plagiarist. Of their neologisms, the unauthorized scribe. Without asking, I borrow a kid’s ardor for tire swings, his grief for lost dogs. I steal what I’ve mislaid: the art of startlement, the art of artlessness. Rabbit Redux Not spring, but its fickle scout: from the park, the smell of skunk and the skunk of weed; in gardens, exhumed saints and righted gnomes. Robin redux, rabbit redux—season of small resentments, the hassle of jackets, the discrepant grass. Of pent-up revving, of soft-serve soft openings. Season of ephemerals, the old bundled as if for the tundra. Season of warblers, the young rouged in dandelion, riding the oaks bareback.