Kelsey Carmody Wort

I Watch My Girlfriend Put Poetry Under Her Microscope

inspired by an image from Matthew Rohrer’s
“There is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier”

There is a picture in her parents’ living room
from when she was probably seven,
maybe older because she’s always looked
young, of her staring straight into the camera,
with lips parted and a cowboy hat. Stoic before
she knew what it meant. She calls it her true grit
phase and if I were a photo-in-the-wallet kind of person,
this would be the one I would keep.

When she gets excited, she talks so fast and long
that she will stop only for a weak cough after losing
her breath. She’s taught me that plants and trees can tell
when they’re being eaten and some can even send
out chemical defenses that attract the enemy
of what’s eating them—somehow even a parasitic
wasp can be an unlikely hero, coming to save corn from
invader worms. That the Black Plague has “always
fascinated her,” studying gruesome lumps in case
of an impending epidemic. And although she is phobic
of spiders and cries when she thinks of them, sometimes
she still chooses to look up their photos and remind
herself of their importance to the trophic structure,
even the ones with fat bodies and tiny quick legs.

After the last poem she read about the Mars Rover,
she remembered a fact she learned about it singing
to itself each year on its birthday, and she took a few
minutes of closed-eye consideration before confessing
that she thought about the Mars Rover often
and sometimes she felt sorry for it, so far away
and all by itself, but she would like to believe
that it would be proud of the good work that it’s doing
for NASA and for the rest of us as well
and that she’s thankful someone decided to write about it
because she wouldn’t know where to start.

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Kelsey Carmody Wort is an MFA candidate in poetry at Purdue University. She loves her home state of Wisconsin, pop music, postcards with painted flowers and dancing around her kitchen.