I Ask My Wife What I Should Write about and She Says, “Seed Pods” and other poems by John Brantingham & Shaymaa Mahmoud

[Editor’s note: This is a father-daughter collaboration.]

I Ask My Wife What I Should Write About and She Says, “Seed Pods”

I think about seed pods tonight, 
those buried under the snow, 
all that potential energy hidden 

the way wasp larvae 
are buried in fruit
the way the Andromeda Galaxy

the whole damn thing
gets hidden by the sun 
because the sun reveals 

that which is on earth
but hides all the rest of it,
and you are on earth

and not awake yet 
because I’m always the one
with insomnia, so I spend 

half of most nights reading
except that’s not what 
I’m doing tonight. 

Tonight, I’m writing 
this poem to you.

Merely Transformed

I still can’t think of figs the same way, 
Knowing a wasp crawls inside to die,
To make the fruit we call ambrosia, 
Smash by the bushel into crimson jam. 

The way a dandelion whittles itself down
Like shimmered milkweed fluff floating 
Off, making new weeds a mile, twenty away, 
offering flowers to bees after the harsh winter.

The way life works, casts a shadow:
The thrumming of negative space 
Between the light and the rest 
Like a death doula, a weeping willow.

The things that we lose making us 
Whole in some other way, and all 
We have to do is buy them the time to 
Show us what’s just on the other side.

Coming Across The Ice

This year Lake Erie
froze over.
I could trudge 
my way across 
and into Canada 
if I wanted,
walk across water 
like an Old Testament
prophet, walk
across like a man 
fleeing his past,
walk across this lake
which is really a sea,
walk out to the middle
so far out 
that the earth’s
curve would hide
even the notion 
of land. I stare
and dream of that 
from the pier
with the dog as you
are inside the place
buying fish and chips.
I can hear the lonely
wind blowing 
across the ice.
It kicks up dust devils
filled with snow 
instead of dust
that the dog barks at.
I imagine she 
hates how lonely
they seem.

ABOUT THE POETS

John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.

Shaymaa Mahmoud has a Master’s in International Relations with a Historical Perspective from Leiden University, and double Bachelors in English and Gender & Women’s Studies from UC Berkeley. As an activist, writer and travel and nature enthusiast, she is committed to advocacy, reparative justice and decolonization. She was the Poetry Editor for Rind Literary Magazine for several years and has been published in places like The Chiron Review, CLAM, Village Poets Anthology and East Jasmine Review. She is working on two flash fiction novels and lives in New York, drawing out plans for a tiny house and trying to fill it with the witchiest stuff she can find.