Episode 155: Gardening 101

Slushies, you could be forgiven this week for thinking you’ve tuned in to a different podcast. One about gardening, maybe? Or perhaps you’ve stumbled across a punctuation pod? But it’s just your usual team ranging wherever the poems might take us. 

 

Today we’re discussing poems by Annie Kantar. The first, “Wolf Peach,” has us pondering folklore, the toxicity of nightshades, and dreaming of our favorite shakshuka. We draw on Dagne’s well of gardening knowledge. The second poem spurs our deep regard for an overlooked punctuation mark with charm and humor. How many ways can you appreciate an apostrophe, that little curve that lets us skip syllables? Lisa cracks open her copy of Edward Hirch’s The Essential Poet’s Glossary to share a definition. Kathy thinks PBQ readers are similarly language-obsessed and will appreciate the extent of our punctuation celebration. 

 

We end the episode with a cliffhanger. You’ll have to keep listening to hear how it all plays out. Sam signs off with a recommendation of the latest from Ben Lerner, Transcription. Join us in offering a big PBQ welcome to our newest co-op, Reese Pfunder! Thanks, as always, for listening.

 

At the table: Dagne Forrest, Tobi Kassim, Samantha Neugebauer, Reese Pfunder, Kathleen Volk Miller, Lisa Zerkle, Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)

Author Bio: Annie Kantar is the author of Means to Be Lucky (Poets & Traitors Press), translator of the Book of Job (Koren), and of Leah Goldberg’s collection of poems, With This Night (University of Texas Press), which was shortlisted for the ALTA Prize. Her work has appeared in journals such as The American Literary Review, Barrow Street, Bennington Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Forma, Gulf Coast, Literary Imagination, On the Seawall, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Rattle, Smartish Pace, Tikkun and Verse Daily, and anthologized in Plume Anthology (Canisy Press), The Art of Poetry (Classical Academic Press), and elsewhere.

 

WOLF PEACH

Once deemed capable 

of turning people

 

into monsters, the inside 

 

of the tomato is dark, 

no matter how vivid, 

 

how vitamin-rich.

 

Darkness is everywhere

and they say if I open 

 

my eyes to the shadow, 

 

I’ll see reality as it is.

Even war has its beauty,

 

cruelty its place; 

 

learn to live with it, 

don’t be fooled:

 

the Peach that bursts

 

in its own sugars, disappearing

in cobblers and pies,

 

could beget a tomato,

 

and has made horrors

of unsuspecting gardeners. 

 

Know its fat blank face, 

 

its bloodthirst,

lest you end up like

 

the Good Egg, 

 

conjurer of casseroles 

for funerals and bedsides,

that storybook apple

 

of everyone’s eye.

All the darkness in the world 

 

surrounds her sunny inside,

 

but she loses every time.

Still the peach is a peach,

and the shakshuka shakshuka

Mar. 2026, after Aharon Shabtai

APOSTROPHE

Shape of an ear in the corner 

of a word, a speck 

frequently misplaced; 

 

signal of elision, 

shortcut to what’s been said 

or couldn’t have been

 

otherwise, a desire for cadence,

synonym for address

(don’t forget where

 

you’re headed), receptacle

for a voice, oracle, or friend; 

informal; a way of getting 

 

to the point; a getting-of-drift,

destination;

a means an end a hand’s 

 

c’mon, teardrop, side eye; 

infinite yet contained, say, 

if God were part person 

 

or sea; the sea; syllable skipper, 

well-wisher, absent

entity, substitute, metonymy 

 

for knowing, a wild guess,

an exclamation implicit

for is and its opposite.

OLD STORY 

What was it, the word she loved, what she called

the most important thing?  Incapable of saying

 

whether it continued through th- - - or ended 

 

in a lisping omission, 

her grandson my grandfather the doctor 

 

learned to nod: yes, of course, it’s all that matters.

 

She had soft hands, they walked beside it:

sometimes it seems no more than a surface 

 

you could walk across, but then you step in 

 

and the water drops off, deeper than you imagined. . . 

Whether he was talking about the lake or 

 

her old world accent, I can’t say; either way, 

 

you know how it goes—soon it was

too late to admit he didn’t understand.

 

Their walks followed the entire circumference, 

 

whose center was that one inscrutable truth 

she’d put on repeat, blurred by an inaudible h or e

 

(or was it an i)? He was a big boy, and by the time    

 

he had to go, as faith or fate would have it,

he no longer needed to know.