This month we bring you three poems selected from Bottom Feeders by ARIELLE HEBERT, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press.
TOC:
—“Elegy for Florida”
—“Red Tide”
—“The Dead Layer”
Elegy for Florida
Almost everything they said about her was true.
Even the bad things.
Especially the bad things.
She began reaching for the water
and never stopped reaching
until she became
an extension of water itself,
her delicate arm just begging
to be snapped off from the panhandle.
By DANIEL TOBIN
Like a dog truant among the tended plots
it turns back toward us a considerate eye
as though sensing the disquiet of our being
lost here among all the unfamiliar graves
that would be landmarks proving the right way
if this were the way we’d believed it to be.
The miracle of the chain:
here, you could be anywhere
and still find the same winter tomatoes
(Greece, California, Spain),
His left wrist dangled out the half-wound-down glass of a boxy brown Cadillac with red felt seats. Flies drifted in and out. He had a dip top cone in his hand. The place was famous for them. You’d think it would be melting in the heat, but the molten chocolate shell held the ice cream within firm and cold. The air reeked of gasoline. No one had thought to turn the engine off.
I do my finest listening in the dark.
My best friend has always been ink
and she lets me talk so much at night.
One of the marvels of my life—
an alphabet. A whole green and mossy
world can be made and remade
from just twenty-six dark curlicues.
Here’s more dark: sometimes birds sleep
tucked under a giraffe’s dusky armpit
![[Freedom Song]](https://www.thecommononline.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/6780574655_9e0b767324_b.jpg)
what does it mean, to be free? i sip coke at my phuppos, azaadi
on the walls of the university, free kashmir sprawled, azaadi
on my body. when i walk the streets of lahore men stare.
can i write the poem that makes me free, that brings azaadi
to my lips? i say i want to drink from its waters, but i know
what it means to be human & dumb, to pray & when azaadi
comes to shun, to judge & say not like this. control, a bitch
deeply un-free, that sticks me in my own mind, azaadi
Dream 1: In which he annoys her
It was New Year’s Eve when he showed up,
in the sleety weather, in his old flannels,
to knock on our door again. You’re back!
my wife cried. I missed you! He laughed,
and as they hugged he lifted her gently
into the air—that’s when she remembered
he was dead. She stopped crying, annoyed
at his ruse, annoyed that this was the day,
of all days, when the ruses of our dead
would be exposed. Still, for a full minute—
after waking but before opening her eyes—
she let him keep holding her in the air.
Our hour at the clinic, test
results and what the doctor guessed.
Then the bright intensity
out on Industrial Boulevard,
the late October sun so hard
and air so crisp that everything
felt close and brash and nearly stung.
By RU FREEMAN
Eudora writes to William about roses
Mr. Hennessey’s Gloire Dijon
Beauty of Glazenwood found
on the sides of barns its yellow
flaked with red caught only
from the windows of passing trains
they didn’t find us beautiful. The haters
let our skin slip, slowly, from our bones,
satiated our thirst with sludge and brine water,
led us to wrathful prayers offered in caves.
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