“Some Notes on Courage,” by Susan Ludvigson

This poem thinks of the ladder to the wire.

I’m a sucker for cheap anthologies at second-hand bookshops.  A piquing title, an unembarrassing theme, a one-digit price penciled in the cover, and I’m buying.  In this case? The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat: Poems by Fifteen Contemporary North Carolina Poets (U of North Carolina Press, 1994).

See: This was another one.