Hello, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.

I'm Kevin Young, Poetry of the New Yorker magazine,

and director of the Schaumburg Center for Research and Black Culture.

On this program, we invite poets to choose a poem from the New Yorker Archive

to read and discuss, along with a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine.

My guest today is Nicole Seeley. She's the executive director at Kavei Kahnem Foundation, and her poetry collection, Ordinary Beast, which was a finalist for the Penn Open Book Award, is also a 2018 Hurston Wright Legacy Award nominee. Welcome, Nicole. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me. So the poem you've selected from the archive is Indigo by Ellen Bass.

Can you tell us what about this poem in particular, caught your eye?

I was just immediately struck by this poem. It's not only is it beautiful, but it's so surprising throughout.

And Ellen Bass's conversational style I was really drawn to, again, the surprise and how while I was reading, just many of my expectations were just flipped upside down. It's just a gorgeous, gorgeous poem. I can't really say enough about the beauty of it. Let's hear it. Let's have a listen. Here's Nicole Seeley reading Indigo by Ellen Bass.

Indigo. As I'm walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs toward me, pushing one of those jogging strollers with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping, which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young, a jungle of indigo and Cornelian tattooed from knuckle to jaw.

Leafy vines and blossoms, saints and symbols.

Thick wooden plugs pierce his lobes and his sunglasses testify to the radiance haloed around him.

I'm so jealous, as I often am.

It's a kind of obsession.

I want him to have been my child's father.

I want to have married a man who wanted to be in a body,

who wanted to live in it so much that he

marked it up like a book, underlining, highlighting, writing in the margins. I was here. Not like my

dead ex-husband, who was always fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours on his zafu, chanting um,

and then went out and broke his hand punching the car. I imagine when this galloping man gets home,

he's going to want to have sex with his wife, who slept in late, and then he'll eat

...