Joan Baranow
Bio:
Joan Baranow is the author of In the Next Life, Living Apart, and two poetry chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Poetry East, JAMA, and elsewhere. She founded and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Dominican University of CA. With her husband David Watts she produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine. Her feature-length documentary, The Time We Have, presents an intimate portrait of a teenager facing terminal illness.
These Days
It’s due dates and tin snipsleft in the rain,an air to the chill, sourgrass slumped over,trees sending mycorrhizalmessages undergroundlike teenagers vibratingunder their clothes,thirty-nine trillion microbesat last count crawling througha commuter jammed in,Starbucks cup miraculously upright.It’s pig brain cellsbrought back from the deaddespite the no confidence vote.You might as well get up,velcro your shoes, the moonis gibbous, which meansbig ass falling backwardsor at least that’s what it saidon the test. The cats are gladto lay their soft slabacross your chest, even thoughyou feed them only dry food.Love can be close uplike sirens in the middle of the day,sandwich at your mouth,or can jump in a spooky wayacross time zones, 3am here, 5 there,which means he’s still asleep, the coffeenot brewed, the dog’s leash slack,the woman he loves a warm wedgein his bed. We make our own bedsis something they say, thoughmost of life comes at youwhile scrambling eggs in the pan,trying to remember the last thingyour mother said on the phonealone in the swollen roombefore she lay down for good.
