BUTTONBUSH
by Petra Kuppers & Orchid Tierney
button:
beauties. bush sweet blobs
and switches. coronas
belt from bold white
knuckles. nicked names
like bobbin cushions
twisted cords wool reels
cotton spindles
cosmos in a trinket
box. braided from dark
duck leaves and arson
toolkits on river
banks. bucks buck for
knot nutlets a kind of
tax account for fruit
ribbons and rivets
common rations for
cartoon deer and cruel
animal felons
meander:
search the cues and cures
decoctions of bark, peel, hark
water boil strain
wash for oculorum dolore
lid lash pink brain fenced
rove the country
anti-inflammation and rheumatism
border control
acute astringent
lever flushed skin
febris remedium
thermoregulatory set-point
cortex dentium pain release:
bone-like cavity flare ascent
here is your order. Set.
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Her fourth poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street, investigates true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil (Wayne State University Press, February 2024). She teaches at the University of Michigan, is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and is an Emeritus Fellow of the Black Earth Institute.
Orchid Tierney (she/her) is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System, 2019) and the chapbook looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, 2023). She is a senior editor at the Kenyon Review.