Poem of the Week | February 09, 2026

Alison Pelegrin is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louisiana Board of Regents, the Foundation for Louisiana, and the Academy of American Poets. Alison’s two most recent poetry collections are Our Lady of Bewilderment (2022) and Waterlines (2016), both with LSU Press. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and The Best American Poetry 2025. While serving as Louisiana Poet Laureate from 2023 to 2025, she founded the Lifelines Poetry Project, and her poetry outreach in prisons continues to this day. She is the writer-in-residence at Southeastern Louisiana University.

“Summer Sadness” by Alison Pelegrin is our Poem of the Week.

Summer Sadness  

No one knows why slugs drown themselves
in beer, but I could make an educated guess.
With small talent it’s hard to perform
great services—Po Chu-I wrote that,
and I can relate. Kids gone, house a mess,
and all my poems are the same—
blah blah minnows in the ditch,
beneath the next blood moon I’ll be older.
At this stage I expected to be stirred up,
on some mission or other. It shames me
to admit that I love hurricanes. No one
comes calling and I can shelter in place
with bottles of wine, my only friends,
and the hummingbird which peekaboos
and maintains possession of lantana gone wild—
a total show-off—about the size and finish
of my uncle’s gold nugget pinkie ring.
An important, toupeed man of the realm
of Gretna he was—name in the papers,
always at some banquet or other,
lost to sadness after a slow demise,
with the white noise of LSU baseball all around.
He’s filed away with my father, who went quick,
in a no-frills mausoleum near which
the ugliest trees of the Westbank keep watch.
Nothing’s the same. My eyes water and I never visit.

Author’s Note

When I lived in Arkansas, I had a traumatic slug experience. Under cover of darkness, these things emerged from nowhere and devoured my double begonias. I knew how to kill them, but because I didn’t have it in me to set out a saucer of beer instead of flowers, all I had on the porch that summer were pots of dirt. By the next year I was back home in Louisiana, where I am continually pestered by cockroaches and mosquitoes, but never slugs. Still, summer uproots sadness in me. I remember Arkansas, or my boys when they were little, fishing in ditches, or my uncle or my dad, and how somber the day turned when we opened the aboveground tomb to make room.