This week’s poem, Gus Peterson’s “Fine Print,” contends with the timeless conundrum of aging and the desire to remain young. I love the allusive glints and fragments of this poem, and how its pace rises and leaps across stanzas as it goes deeper into darkness.
Peterson lives in Randolph and serves on the board of the Maine Poets Society, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing poetry to all Maine residents. He has been featured online in Rattle’s Poets Respond series and in the U.K. with Black Nore Review. Work is forthcoming in 2023 with “Panoply” and “Pirene’s Fountain.”
Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers, LGBTQ+ writers, and other underrepresented voices. You’ll find a link to submit in the credits below.
Fine Print
By Gus Peterson
Immortal age beside immortal youth
And all I was, in ashes.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Tithonus”
As in no, you may not
wish for more wishes.
As in asked to live forever.
As in not forever young.
As in metamorphose
to three legs, then six.
As in Monkey’s Paw
wintered to a fist.
As in it never dies,
her sleepless summer
dark. Its hot breath.
And that cicada shriek
for release, perhaps love,
that too will linger on
like a moonlit shadow
over the sound of crickets.
As in disquieting silence
or the male, seeking.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Fine Print,” copyright 2023 by Gus Peterson, appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.
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