Poems / August 22, 2023

[Polaroid of]

Katie Jean Shinkle

I’m shoving blueberries
into my bloodstream
smoking strawberries
out of a broken lightbulb
snorting raspberries
up my nose
I’m smoking blackberries
rolled with tobacco
in a nightmare rotation
of every person
who has broken my heart
I am flicking the outside of the bag
of lingonberries
with my fingertips
wetting for a taste of cran
waiting around all day
for my plug to come through
with ounces of boysen
grams of huckle and black currant
don’t lecture me about pesticides
or how to handle delicacies
tell me instead how to satiate
how to find my way back

Katie Jean Shinkle

More from The Nation

Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s “The Lord of the Castle Spying on His Daughter” (circa 1900).

Can We Still Recover the Right to Be Left Alone? Can We Still Recover the Right to Be Left Alone?

The political theorist Lowry Pressly thinks we’ve abandoned a more creative and humanist definition of the concept.

Books & the Arts / Cora Currier

“Morning in a City,” Edward Hopper (1944 )

The Harrowing Ardor of Heather Lewis The Harrowing Ardor of Heather Lewis

Her fiction was miscast as merely transgressive. Rather, her novels were interested in understanding life in its most unvarnished and unmediated.

Books & the Arts / Gracie Hadland

What the Paiva Family Means to Brazil

What the Paiva Family Means to Brazil What the Paiva Family Means to Brazil

In I’m Still Here, one Brazilian clan’s confrontation with the military dictatorship dramatizes the last half-century of Brazil’s democratic travails.

Books & the Arts / Andre Pagliarini

Beatriz Nascimento’s Histories of Afro-Brazilian Rebellion 

Beatriz Nascimento’s Histories of Afro-Brazilian Rebellion  Beatriz Nascimento’s Histories of Afro-Brazilian Rebellion 

The scholar, poet, and filmmaker devoted her life to sketching out a revisionist historiography of resistance in Latin America but also the world.

Books & the Arts / Yasmina Price

“The Pitt” and the Gritty Return of the Hospital Drama

“The Pitt” and the Gritty Return of the Hospital Drama “The Pitt” and the Gritty Return of the Hospital Drama

 In the frenzied medical drama, the limits and problems of the healthcare system serve as the basis for the show’s plot.

Books & the Arts / Jorge Cotte

A still from “Hard Truths.”

The Uncomfortable Genius of Mike Leigh The Uncomfortable Genius of Mike Leigh

In “Hard Truths,” Leigh reminds us that a family dinner can tell the story of a whole society.

Books & the Arts / J. Hoberman