Poets famous, academic, and obscure have long been responded/contemplated/riffed on by Mary Oliver, one of the of the most popular and beloved late 20th Century poets. Oliver was and is admired for her spiritually centered, deeply personal work rooted in feminism, the wild and comforting nature surrounding her, love, and social vision. One of he most interesting reflections comes from Rose Zinnia and is featured in the April edition of Poetry magazine.
The late Mary Oliver photographed in 1966.
Zinnia was born in Akron, Ohio. She is the author of the chapbook Togethering (Ledge Mule Press, 2024) and is the recipient of the 2022 Ninth Letter Literary Award, the 2022 Vera Meyer Strube Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the 2021 Kraft-Kinsey Award from the Kinsey Institute. Her writing appears in New Ohio Review, Foglifter, The Journal, Gulf Coast, Sycamore Review, Split This Rock, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Ninth Letter, West Branch, and other journals.
Zinnia is a transexual woman.
I’m Like If Mary Oliver Had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
A busted self-blazon / infodump in memes
i’m evolving from sadtrans to joytrans & g-d is my pokémon trainer
i only expect i will have a final form by the circumstance of my being
perishable when i enter a room my brain calculates how many ppl
might be clocking me & how
i am trying to let wonder & uncertainty dom me every day
sometimes i’m feral napcore audhd hyporheic cloudleaf unmasked pilled
tbh i’m not even trans i’m a sheaf of blessings that makes a soft noise when
you strum it
when we trace back our wound to root it becomes unwound it mutates into
grace
catch me divinizing the quotidian by becoming obsessed w this river-
smoothed stone i found i fully expect a mycelial network to fall in love w me for some reason
my/your face a coven of we a listening beyond the comprehensible
it is not enough to love the earth i must merge my body w hers entirely
i’m like if love were a kind of esoteric circle that exploded every six months
& was also a woman
looking back i’m jealous all my bullies insisted i was a girl before i did
the word bad comes from the old english bæddel meaning hermaphrodite
(pejorative)
attention is the beginning of devotion is something mary oliver said
my body being stored within the word bad is a form of devotion my attention is both deficient & hyperactive i.e. i am touchingfeeling everything constant
devotion is the practice of belonging is something the earth cosplaying as me
said
as a joytrans my special pokèmon moves are witness & surrender
i think i am just trying to have a nice day most of the time but i am open to
bæddel days too
the coolest thing ab me is probably when you google my name
you are met only w flowers
—Rose Zinnia
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