Poem of the Week | December 08, 2025

“Yoga in the Workplace” by Jared White is our Poem of the Week.

Jared White was raised in a valley of apple orchards along the Columbia River of Washington state. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of South Florida and a PhD in creative writing (poetry) from Georgia State University. He currently lives in Georgia, where he teaches a variety of English courses at Georgia Gwinnett College. His poems are often informed by childhood memories, family stories about people he’s never met, and the landscapes in which he’s lived.

Yoga in the Workplace

I walk into the classroom, and a young woman in a headband and leg warmers is leading my English class in a sun salutation. “I’ve come to you from the West,” she says. “My avocado farm has failed; I’m sure you’ve heard it’s a difficult economy for stone fruit.” I start to ask her what she’s all about, spreading her long, pink yoga mat wherever she pleases, but before I speak, I see her purple sneakers beside her and know she’s my long-lost wife who hitchhiked to California years ago to find truth and beauty. I lift her in my arms like a still unravished bride and say, “Let’s go home, bold lover,” but she looks bewildered and afraid. Then, with the openness for adventure I’ve come to expect from yoga instructors, she wraps her arms around my neck, looks deeply into my teeth, and kisses me. Just as I’m about to tell her to “pump the breaks, sister; you’re moving too fast,” the students stand and erupt into sunflowers and unbridled applause, they’re carrying us on their shoulders, down the hallway (we’re all singing like angels now), through the campus courtyard like we’re heroes until we reach my car, a Datsun with rust holes in the floor. With almost no warning, the engine starts itself. Birds are gathering now, maybe hundreds, and the few without worms wriggling from their beaks sing for us. Weeping, she looks up into my face and says, “We have found it! This is all we have on earth and all we need to know!” Datsun signals and pulls away from the curb, accelerates down the block, our students running beside us, their big seedy faces beaming.

Author’s Note

When I was living in Tampa, Florida, during my MFA program, a professor introduced me to Memoir of the Hawk, a poetry collection by James Tate. I was stunned by how humorous and unrealistic it dared to be. I didn’t know poems could do that. It’s since been among my favorite books for its zany surrealism and surprisingly humorous narrative twists. In homage to Tate’s brand of surrealism, I tried in this poem to create pairings that are not often found together: yoga and college classrooms; a reality-based work environment and one’s private imaginings; rekindling a romantic relationship and being in the same room as one’s students; the lighthearted, humorous strategies of Tate’s work and references to John Keats’s foundational, required-college-reading classic, “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Of the poems I’ve written, this was probably the most fun to write.