Poppy Seeds

Allison Davis

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781606351581
• eBook ISBN: 9781612776903
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Spanning oceans and continents, language and the imagination, the unfathomable distances between people and their desires, Allison Davis's Poppy Seeds creates an "immaculate atlas." Here language is "broken… against the margin of the sea," and a word is a thing that can be "wash[ed] away." Here the body is both a lesson and a place with an edge you can drive to. The book "longs[s] for as long as Ohio rivers." Tangled between worlds and languages both old and new, our deepest emotions search for their roots, hoping to find a place to call home.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Poppy Seeds

To Devorah Mazur

Occupation

Distances

Language Lesson

Timing

On a Theme by Moyshe Kulbak

Gust Martin

The Merchant Marine’s Wife

Summer Contours

Still

Matriarch to Patriarch

Spare Regrets

Beautiful, the dead end

Symbiotic Economics

Thinking About It from Here

Katedros aikštė/Cathedral Square

Note

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to the editors of Prick of the Spindle where “Summer Contours” first appeared. I am grateful for The George and Emily Severinghaus Beck Fund Scholarship for Study at Vilnius Yiddish Institute during which many of these poems were written.

For their encouragement and guidance, I’d like to thank Angela Pitinii, Kathy Fagan, Henri Cole, Andrew Hudgins, Joanie Mackowski, Tom LeClair, David Miller, Neil Jacobs, Jack Hay, and Vivian Axiotis McGarrity. My gratitude to my family extends back many generations.

POPPY SEEDS

Dominikonų Gatvė

Mother, his teeth were full of poppy seeds,

his teeth exact as the cobblestones.

The cobblestones covered in pigeons,

Mother, and the white paper bag from the bakery

rattles with leftover poppy seeds

with noise so violet, so sharp

that all of my vowels become poppy seeds,

Mother, his name was all vowels like poppy seeds

dotted over the yellow sun.

I crossed an ocean. It crossed me.

His eyes I exchanged for poppy seeds,

Mother, fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedecation Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Poppy Seeds
• To Devorah Mazur
• Occupation
• Distances
• Language Lesson
• Timing
• On a Theme by Moyshe Kulbak
• Gust Martin
• The Merchant Marine’s Wife
• Summer Contours
• Still
• Matriarch to Patriarch
• Spare Regrets
• Beautiful, the dead end
• Symbiotic Economics
• Thinking About It from Here
• Katedros aikštė/Cathedral Square
• Note