Julie Choffel, Featured in the Ocean State Review

In “Foraging, No Meadow,” Julie Choffel creates a foraging in the method of the lines themselves. The poem sets up irresistible tension in its searching and asks us what we can find both because and in spite of this forage; we see not the meadow, but the dining room table, the fingerprints, the “nothing without kin.” Choffel asks us to consider how the environment and action of foraging is brought into a domestic, familial space, even without the meadow. Elements of heritage and temporality are considered and questioned here, and Choffel opens a crucial world of exchange between environment and kin.
—Katie Mihalek, Managing Editor

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from Volume 14 of Ocean State Review

Foraging, No Meadow

But the dining room table, dappled
with fingerprints.

A too-small sample: Everyone who came and went.
Countless meals. Paper, graphite, ink, and glue.
Pollen, shell, candlewick.

Nothing without kin.

The field study marks off a square in the early spring
and begins the naming, giddy with taxonomy.

Voices open up the room.

What were the common words again? False goldenaster,
false lupin. False exile. False problem. False square.

At the close of day, we try to say what mattered.
Was it the beginning, the middle, or the end?

A catch in every glass.

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Julie Choffel is the author of Dear Wallace (The Backwaters/University of Nebraska Press, 2024) and The Hello Delay (Fordham UP, 2012). Her work has appeared in New England Review, Conduit, Tupelo Quarterly, Orion, New American Writing, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Connecticut in Hartford.