Poem of the Week | October 12, 2026

Catie Rosemurgy is the author of two books of poems, My Favorite Apocalypse and The Stranger Manual, both from Graywolf Press. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the College of New Jersey.

“Diorama 1871 (while a pie burns, the schoolteacher’s wife keeps going)” by Catie Rosemurgy is our Poem of the Week.

Title image: Gezin kijkt verschrikt op van het diner. Dat’s de wekker! (1930) by T.A.J. Vermeulen (Dutch, 20th Century)

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Diorama 1871 (while a pie burns, the schoolteacher’s wife keeps going)

The newcomers arrived in Gold River in such large numbers. So much sudden. So many  

            stools, bunks, bowls, shovels, nails, cleavers, ladders 

            chutes, pipes, levers, cinches, planks, bolts, shears   

            stakes, plots, parcels, holdings, claims, allotments  

            freighters, schooners, barges, barks, steamers  

            disputes, interests, debts, ledgers, accounts 

            names, births, graves, clans, vows, curses, oaths  

            pins, hats, curls, cuffs, feathers, buttons, tokens,  

            elbows, tongues, femurs, arteries, knuckles, spines,  

            carvings, whittlings, peelings, dusts, shavings, fumes 

            spills, falls, pops, knocks, gouges, guttings  

            nicks, cuts, bruises, rots, punctures, sprains  

            fractures, limps, twists, tears, pulls, knots  

            pithings, pokings, severings, suturings, swellings 

            infections, fevers, fugues, visions, airs, aches      

            contusions, blisters, ruptures, drainings 

            abrasions, breakings, brandings, bulgings 

            boils, plaques, rashes, pimples, pustules 

            scrapes, bumps, gashes, stings, dislocations 

            oozings, numbness, faintings, blindings, chokings  

Accurate records could not be maintained. They lost track of what hurt and how much and who felt it.  

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Author’s Note:

This poem is from a book I began writing after visiting two local history museums in the upper Midwest near where I grew up. Both museums largely ignore the role of colonial settlement in their curation, and that silence felt hauntingly malignant to me in the days after my visit. One of the museums features a diorama of the once-thriving, now-deserted town in which the museum is located. As a way of exploring the fatal mixture of inability and unwillingness that prevents us from developing a shared, public narrative of our history, I began to write poems that imagine the tiny, white figures in the diorama beginning to speak.