Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 6 features Megan McDermott and Millie Tullis. Megan reads “Dear Ruth, on the Purity, or Impurity, of Attention,” published in the Vita Poetica Journal. Millie reads “Getting There” published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Ruth, on the Purity, or Impurity, of Attention by Megan McDermott “Then Boaz said to the elders and all the people, ‘…I have also acquired Ruth the Moabite, the wife of Mahlon, to be my wife, to maintain the dead man’s name on his inheritance….’” – Ruth 4:9-10 (NRSV) When Mahlon was alive, I gave him his due, but not what people give each other today. That’s not how we thought, marriage a matter of getting things done, though the To-Do list never shortened much: those babies never born – our emptiness like a tree that grew, year by year, closer to the quiet God in the sky who stayed unmoved by our efforts. At his deathbed, I said goodbye, to him and the List of What Was Unachieved. What was my point? Oh, attention, affections, purity. They come unbidden and unburdened when there’s no list of what you’re meant to produce. With Naomi, there was no way to fall short, no expectation of what I should or could have given. I was free – to give nothing or everything. So I gave everything. Getting there By Millie Tullis my husband questions the good historical centers like this do. Kids come every year on a field trip and leave thinking history sucks because they don’t want to touch a cow’s hot udder. He did not want to touch the cow’s udder and is remembering how the man dressed as a pioneer called them city slickers when they lived ten minutes down the road. I loved these field trips and saved babysitting money to return in the summer. I made candles by running in a circle. Imagined I was Laura Ingalls Wilder. Churned butter in a skirt. The historical farm was his great great grandfather’s. He says it’s not like this is that farm. Half the valley was somebody’s farm a hundred years ago. When I was a kid here we kept our eyes peeled for the adults working behind the scenes who wore blue jeans and t-shirts like us. There are rules about what clothing volunteers wear on the farm. My husband did not know his great great grandfather had three wives but he isn’t surprised. The first dead. The next two in polygamy. The second and third were sisters. They share one headstone nearby. The sisters and the husband. The oldest sister who is the second wife buried between her husband and sister. They were both nineteen the years he married them. I can’t stop digging up my dead men for judgment. My great grandfather who had an affair with his secretary after his round-faced wife gave birth to nine-pound twins and lived. My mother remembers the skin on this grandmother’s stomach hung over her aproned waist like a long pancake. My third great grandfather married his stepdaughter. My second great grandfather also married his stepdaughter after raising her from the age of eight. Tonight we do not enter the visitors center where the photograph of my husband’s great great grandfather hangs. We are walking to the open grass before the too-clean-to-be-accurate mercantile storefront selling honey and rock candy sticks to listen to the state-sponsored symphony perform in the 125th year of Utah statehood. We open our camping chairs above the earth my husband’s great great grandmother walked. The younger sister of her husband’s second wife she married him in Mexico three months before Wilford Woodruff’s revelation renounced the practice of polygamy publicly clearing the way for statehood. Tonight the smoke from California’s fires reddens the setting sun until the only lights left on are the stars the stringed bulbs of the mercantile store and the half domes of light letting the players see the song they have already began to play.
Megan McDermott is the author of Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems, available now from Fernwood Press, Bookshop.org, Amazon, or your favorite indie/small bookstore. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating, available from Ethel Zine and Micro-Press, and Woman as Communion, available from Game Over Books.
Megan’s poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Christian Century, Rust + Moth, Rogue Agent Journal, Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith, and The Cresset. She is also a poetry reader for one of her favorite online lit journals, Psaltery & Lyre.
Learn more at meganmcdermottpoet.com. A link to the poem “Dear Ruth, on the Purity, or Impurity, of Attention” can be found here.
Millie Tullis (she/they) is a writer, editor, teacher, and researcher. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and an MA in American Studies & Folklore from Utah State University. Her digital micro-chap, Dream With Teeth, was published by Ghost City Press in 2023. Her poetry has been published in Sugar House Review, Stone Circle Review, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, SWWIM, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Millie is the Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal. Raised in northern Utah, she lives in upstate South Carolina.
Learn more at millietullis.com. A link to the poem “Getting There” can be found here.
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You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/. And, on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org