Poem of the Week | December 11, 2023

This week’s Poem of the Week is “Little Love Ditty Diddy Dum Diddy Do” by Ronda Piszk Broatch.

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023), finalist for the Sally Albiso Prize, and Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Greensboro Review, Blackbird, Sycamore Review, Palette Poetry, Moon City Review, and NPR News / KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.

Little Love Ditty Diddy Dum Diddy Do

Salt me a song, a torched mallow bloom
so lunched up you’d think we rode in
on a gull-wing and a buttery refrain.

Think repeats, how hard it is to kiss
the backside of a blizzard at thirty below,
how easy it is in the frigid to spoon,

too cold to fork. Snowfall sugars the tent
we don’t sleep in, in that we are in it
but we don’t sleep, nor do we sleep in.

I repeat, I think I need to be sent to bed
amongst the scent of armpit and two-day
wood smoked flesh. Because under me is

a mountain, an errant grit of gravel,
a root that forgot its tree. Root/gravel/tree
and repeat there’s no switchback,

no elevation gain won’t giddy me
down to my waterproof boots, the heels
of which crumble from years of rocky

terrain. How hard it is to smooch under a low
shower head, my head always the one
getting showered on, rain in my eyes

and that hickey — really? We in our 50’s
60’s. Oh! Did you just bloom into buttery
song too? Or was that just me, gull-winging

my way across the forest floor, trying to
arrive, to wash up again and over again
at altitude. Attitude! Baby, levitate me.

Author’s Note

I don’t usually write love poems.

During 2020, a week after shutdown, Kelli Russell Agodon, Martha Silano, and I met weekly via zoom, without fail, for at least 50 weeks. We created new writing prompts each week, and each week we wrote three poems apiece. As the weeks progressed, the prompts became more and more creative, often including word lists or scrambled word blocks to draw from, and wacky questions to be answered. We’d create maps to follow, spins surrealist ideas, and forms to contain them. We would break out of form, defy questions, bring in and report on life from the outside world, mostly from nature where we felt safest at the time.

I don’t usually write love poems, but this one is based on truth, and a prompt.