We’re so over the snow and ice, Slushies. Join us as we cozy up to three poems from Hilary King. We admire the first poem’s warm nostalgia towards old technology and its recollection of a burgeoning appreciation for art. Sam notes how well the poem’s title prepares the reader for the poem that follows. The pairing of the projection of art and the projection of memory intrigues Jason. The setting in an art history class sends Sam to the Julia Roberts’ movie Mona Lisa Smile, also set in 1953. Whether mothers or daughters, we consider how much we can know about another person’s interior life.
Kathy puts on her bad cop hat, but in the nicest way possible. We’re thinking about the importance of sharply observed details and how they can focus a poem from the general to the specific. In the final poem we’ll clarify whether we’re talking about drunk aunts or drunk ants and why either would be preferable to a drunk uncle. And Dagne questions what duties an epigraph can or should perform.
Slushies, if you’re attending AWP in March, please stop by and see us at the book fair. We’ll be at table 1272. We’d love to see you in person. Thanks, as always, for listening!
At the table: Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)
Author Bio: Originally from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, Hilary King is a poet now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Salamander, The Louisville Review, Fourth River, Common Ground Review, and other publications. She was the 2023 winner of the Rose Warner Prize from Freshwater Review and the second place winner of the 2025 Common Ground Review Annual Poetry Prize. She serves as an editor for DMQ Review, and her book of poems Stitched on Me was published by Riot in Your Throat Press in 2024.
Author Website: www.hilarykingwriting.com
Instagram: @hilaryseessomething
Facebook: Hilary Rogers King
Bluesky: @hilary299.bsky.social
My Mother’s Scholarship Job, 1953
In the ivied dark, she rushes to keep up.
The professor barks out facts, theories,
slows only for art he likes, or to hiss
when she fumbles a slide, sending a Renoir sideways,
her face hot in the yellow projector light,
rows of girls in store-bought clothes
turning to stare at her.
After she was accepted, her mother began sewing,
made her six versions of the same dress,
full-skirted, round necked, good as any
that ever dressed a mannequin.
She does fumble the slides. She hasn’t mastered
this machine, dazed by how it transforms
a square into the magnificent.
Monet’s shimmering train station, Van Gogh’s
glowing garden at Arles.
She never tells her mother she wears dungarees
for the class she takes over and over again,
the machine oily, trapping her in the dark,
in the back, never up front, her pencil poised
like a fork for a feast.
Nest
She turned thirteen
and shut her door on us.
We let her, let her make
a freedom of those four walls.
What she did, watched,
heard, learned, hid–
we had only outlines,
fear and hope filled in the rest.
Mornings she stepped over
the threshold, shouldered
her childhood, cycled towards
the gristmill.
Afternoons she returned, spent,
recovered only with the door closed.
Gone just yesterday, grown enough
to go, I leave her door open,
let it swing like memory.
How to Be Peonies
from Trader Joe’s
Enter the house in a shroud.
Allow the presence of water.
Exist as a fist.
When no one is looking, peep out
one pink petal.
That night, alone again,
unfurl another.
Watch them walk past the golden pollen
you fed the table.
Get drunk on your own beauty,
open your face wide as a drunk aunt’s smile.
One day later, die spectacularly, fabulously
your magenta remains scattered like broken glass.
