A H A N D P I C K E D P O E M presented by Michael Todd Steffen

 A H A N D P I C K E D P O E M

presented by Michael Todd Steffen

From AGNI 102, autumn 2025

Let Me Put It This Way

by Katherine Indermaur

When I light my lighthouse’s

lantern, the ships come,

their hard bodies creaking, snouts

first to breach the bay, to beach

on my glistening shores. Men pour out

to dry their salt-crested beards

and their angry laughter. They burn

red and blister and bully. They cut

off each other’s fingers, cut out

each other’s eyes, and more besides.

From my window, I watch the lantern

knit its shadows into the waves.

Then the men, bored with bloodshed, turn

to me, singing, Come to the window,

let down your hair. They call me one wrong name

after another. They are climbing my stairs.

I could say that, in a panic,

I seized the lantern and hurled it

into the sea, that I survived

long enough to bear a child who had so many fathers

that he inherited every kingdom on earth

and on every shore built a lighthouse for me

but that would just be the prayer

I recite as they reach the final step.

~ ~ ~

I was so taken with Katherine Indermaur’s poem the first time I read it and had to reread it over and over, that night it kept piecing itself back to me in my dreams, the ships drifting to the lighthouse’s shore, the sterns of the vessels described as “snouts” like pigs, with the vivid nearly cartoonish pirates and their behavior, wearing their half-naked sun burns, bullying one another, cutting off each other’s fingers and cutting out each other’s eyes. Caricatures of exaggerated violence, the sort that makes us laugh—yeah, right—as at so much other dubious language, though formally belonging to the genre of Napoleonic romance—all this is more than familiar to us, ubiquitous in our media, at the highest official levels, these days. Such a politically prominent notion—conspicuous immigration—dolled up in these terms casts a wholly different light on what can easily be reduced to demographics and conflicting national ideals. Oddly lampooning, the poem is winding toward a deeper humanization of alienation.

So many levels are at work in Indermaur’s positioning herself in that lighthouse, New England and California, shore to shining shore, making the invention of her speaker in the poem mythic and even colossal, and, even more endearing, part of our bedtimes (involving deeper, more intimate levels of meaning, childhood and adult) when the men’s call to her transforms her into Rapunzel: let down your hair…after she has worded her lantern into magic, having knit its shadows into the waves. Above all, brilliant poems turn brilliant phrases.

Dig a little, like a pirate for a treasure map, a lot of potential homemade guilt is buried in this mesmerizing incantatory poem, latticed for absolution (hence her title, Let Me Put It This Way) in a verbalization of what’s going on here. Not all poets are childless—and thus prone to evoke the demigod-like child who had so many fathers, which is like the writing produced of loneliness, the body of desperation illuminated by creative insight, intelligence, enlightenment, entertainment that potentially carries the parent-writer’s all but DNA code on in the world.

Katherin Indermaur’s poems have also appeared in Ecotone, Frontier Poetry, New Delta Review, Seneca, just to name a few of her prominent literary journal credits. Her essays and poems have won many awards, including the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and the 2023 Colorado Book Award. She currently edits for Sugar House Review and Alpinist