Drudge Gloom

The weather was tired. Clouds swept. Rain fallen in. Grief
was a kind of cough medicine I was drinking. Not cherry.

That orchard was a long time ago. He brought his wallet
out of his pocket like an old tongue. Bring your bugle

to me. I said. Maybe. Repeating his name. There was a rug
on the floor and a rug burn to come. I had to break down

the organ of love. And I thought maybe I need not extrude
that matter myself. Freud can keep his ideas of shame

covered with a loincloth on his own couch. Drudge. Gloom.
Shock of hair. No need for the one who cuts the thread barging in.

Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2021, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.