My name is Podrigotumma and something I've noticed over the last few years in poetry is that I've become increasingly more and more interested in poems about material things, a poem that's describing something you can touch or feel or taste or see, something that has a body of its own.

I find such comfort in that. Strangely, when I've been in times of grief myself or difficulty, that can be in the midst of being a very physical sensation of feeling heavy or finding it difficult to move.

You can also feel out of your body and a poem that brings you into your body, that brings you into paying close attention to something often helps me pay attention to myself as well.

Worm by Gail MacDonald

Borrowing in your allotted patch, you move through the dark. Muscles contracting one by one in every part, lengthening and shortening this slick, segmented tube of you, furrows in your wake.

Devising passages for water, air, you plop the gaps that keep the structure from collapse.

Dead things you know, plants and creatures both, your grooves shift matter, sifting as you go.

Ilus, your appetite aerates, eating the world you open it, you ingest to differentiate.

Under the footstamped earth, you eat into a clout of leaf mold, clay and mildew and express what you can part with, as self-possessed as when you started.

Your secretions bind the soil, your shit enriches it. How things lie now will be undone, will reoccur.

You, a surface level archivist sensing all there is can be gone through, the body born within its plot.

This is a poem called Worm and it really is a poem to a worm.

Gamma Connell is one of many poets who writes what you could call creaturely poems, who takes a really clear and full-eyed vision of a creature in front of her and looks at it and researches it as all kinds of data about worms in this poem.

Some people might take an eagle or a whale or a dog. I love this because it takes such a close look at a worm, something that perhaps we spent a lot of time thinking about as children,

finding worms gross or curious. But this is a poem that pays such intellectual and investigative and imaginative attention to a worm.

This is a poem, a short enough poem of 20 lines, but there are sentences that stretch out over lines in this poem and the first sentence is four lines long, and then the next sentence is two lines, and then the next sentence is half a line followed by another half a line.

And on and on throughout the poem there is sentences of one line or three lines or one and a half lines or half a sentence that moves into another half a sentence.

It's almost like the poem too is taking the shape of a worm, stretching itself out and then contracting itself, stretching out and contracting and burrowing its way through the dark and being present while moving and making itself longer and shorter, just like the worm does.

So the poem too is doing the work that it's admiring.

In preparing for this I wondered what is a worm? It's described as a long cylindrical tube of a body with no limbs.

It doesn't have longs either at breath through its skin, and worms are usually eyeless. This is an earthworm that's being described here, something that burrows.

And the poem pays attention to how the earthworm's muscles contract one by one to move it along, lengthening and shortening, and how a worm secreets a certain kind of oil to keep it slick so it can move, and that also helps the earth.

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