Across Which the World
What luxury there is in what bees
in Brazil have wept and Turkish beekeepers
have culled from the transformed pollen of flowers
of some German field I can not conjure; there
in the interstices between neurons across which
both memory and new thought leap, across which
the world is reimagined from what could be
to what is
to what might,
I peer, and think of us, like drones,
and the thrum of this world
that leaves such amazing residue
of what we make together
and of what we weep
into being.
About Laura McCullough
Laura McCullough is a poet and memoirist. Her books include The Wild Night Dress, selected by Billy Collins in the Miller Williams Poetry Contest, University of Arkansas Press, Jersey Mercy (Black Lawrence Press), Rigger Death & Hoist Another (BLP), Panic (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, Alice James Books), Speech Acts (BLP), and What Men Want (XOXOX Press). She has edited two anthologies, A Sense of Regard: essays on poetry and race (Georgia University Press, 2015) and The Room and the World: essays on Stephen Dunn (University of Syracuse Press, 2014). Her poems and prose have appeared in Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Writer’s Chronicle, Guernica, Cimarron Review, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Pank, Hotel America, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and magazines. She has been awarded scholarships or fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the Betsy House, Marble House, and has been a Dodge Poetry Festival poet, a Florida Writers Circuit poet, and a Decatur Book Festival poet. She held two NJ State Arts Council Fellowships, one in poetry and one in prose. She teaches full time at Brookdale Community College, has taught at Stockton University and Ramapo College, and is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-res MFA where she teaches poetry and critical theory. Visit her at http://www.lauramccullough.org/.
Photo credit—Emory Broek
