Poem of the Week | August 31, 2026

Anna Drasko is a writer living in East Tennessee. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chestnut Review, phoebe, Good River Review, and elsewhere. They hold degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State. 

“Maker” by Anna Drasko is our Poem of the Week.

***

Maker

My mouth is a basket of tricks, I’ll chew  

& spit before thinking better of it. Memory 

announced itself mid gnash as the flesh 

of a stale peanut thinned between  

two or three teeth, visiting the years  

I let dough knead deep  

in nails & pry the goo from half moons 

just to hear the clustered bubbles of crust  

tell me what they know. Maybe it made sense 

once, but the starter is now rotting  

in my fridge. There was never a time  

I found it easy to make  

something. The two turkeys 

in the tree, I never knew they could make it  

that high. My neighbor’s dog  

chased one through the kudzu & it flew  

to a branch in the sky— Dolly 

wanders when the wild garlic blooms.  

I texted, Dolly’s loose again. She’ll make 

her way home, but on nice days 

she takes her time about it. I like to sit in glass 

tipped leaves & watch the turkeys 

hiding from Dolly & remember how I made 

everyone believe making bread suited me,  

they like it when a woman  

makes something they can eat. She : ) 

is such : ) a great : ) baker : ). I have yet to solve 

my body. No, it’s not solved,  

*they’re not solved, 

but magnified. Language is still  

in the making, usually saying  

more & less than its meaning. 

***

Author’s Note

This poem began in my backyard, where we share a guardrail with the highway, and the invasive kudzu vine suffocates every native plant by June. Amid the cars blurring by, I spend nights watching the turkeys, cats, hawks, groundhogs, the occasional deer, and my neighbors’ loose dogs. Despite the pollution, everything is so alive. No matter what the conditions, life still unfolds. I didn’t know turkeys could fly until I saw Dolly chase one up into that tree, and that same day, I checked on my sourdough starter with its layers of pink and black and green that had been rotting in my fridge for months. I enjoyed watching the mold multiply week after week in new colors as I stopped making bread around the same time I left being a “woman” behind. It was an abandonment that felt right. This poem turned toward Ars Poetica as I pressed up against the limits of language, which happens often when I try to put words to my experiences of gender, or to anything.