Origin Stories - Joanne Durham

Garbage

    Garbage
    by Joanne Durham

    Creepy old guy’s digging through the garbage at 6:00 am—
    Bill complains
    on the locals’ page.
    Neighbors suggest he’s an artist, gathering tin to shape
    into tourist treasures, replace creepy
    with harmless, quiet, down on luck,
    vow to leave sorted cans along his route, even say his name.

    Bill retorts SO WHAT DO I TELL MY KIDS?
    preparing for school in morning shadows.

    I reply:
    Go to school, my dear ones, learn to salvage
    the bounty that belongs to us all. Scrounge
    through rubbish to find it, don’t be shooed away
    like a swarming fly.
    It’s your world to retrieve.



    *"Garbage" – First published in Kosmos Quarterly, and included in my new chapbook, 
    On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books January 2023)

Origin Stories – Garbage

Sometimes you see or hear something and you just know it’s crying out for a poem. That’s what happened with “Garbage”. I read on a local social media site a neighbor’s complaint about a man going through his trash can in the early morning. What struck me were the responses he got from other people who had empathy with the old man. The author of this post responded with “so what do I tell my kids?” and that did it – I knew I had to make a poem out of how I would respond to his question. I wanted to take it to a broader context of what we teach our kids, the importance of teaching them to think for themselves, dig deeply into history and not accept stock answers to difficult issues in our society.

BIO

Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022), and On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books 2023). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry South (Pushcart nomination), NC Literary Review, Gyroscope, Dodging the Rain, Whale Road Review and many other journals and anthologies. She lives on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Learn more about her work at https://www.joannedurham.com/.

https://www.joannedurham.com/poetry-books (information and ordering for books)

https://www.instagram.com/poetryjoanne/

https://twitter.com/DurhamJoanne

https://kelsaybooks.com/products/on-shifting-shoals