Poem of the Week | August 10, 2015

This week we’re delighted to feature a new poem by Allison Adair. Adair’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Mid-American Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Boston Globe, and the anthology Hacks; hypertext projects appear on The Rumpus and Electric Literature. Winner of the 2014 Fineline Competition, Adair is on the English faculty at Boston College and teaches poetry workshops at Grub Street.
 
Author’s Note:

This poem began in the Boston winter, when forecasters bookended each storm with grave commentaries about danger upon danger upon danger. Snow was all anyone could talk about. But with everything else going on in the world, much less in our own inner lives, the excessive attention on local weather seemed comical to me – like a seasonal diversionary tactic. There are plenty of dangers that don’t depend on a season, that are already here, dependable as they come. So I wrote the title of this poem first, as a joke, then began composing a list of things we probably have little reason to fear. It quickly became clear, though, how easily natural images accept our own emotional narratives, and how much we do to maintain the distance of that relationship. As I kept writing, I realized I needed to address the promise of the title – so what should we fear? To me, it’s the truly unpredictable stuff – or worse yet, the stuff we insist is unpredictable, the way we try to fake ourselves out, when we know what’s coming all along.