Delight on a telephone pole

I’ve noticed this spot before. Whoever tends it (on a corner near many apartment complexes) has woven pipe cleaners and staples around the pole so she (I’m guessing a pronoun) can insert fresh flowers or leaves next to poems tacked up weekly. The pole-tender must care very much about poetry, as the poet she features this week has only been published in obscure online literary magazines. This week’s poem is as follows:

I dream a colony of dirty pretty girls. They wash their hair in sugar
& no one ever insinuates their weakness. The new sun is their common
fetus & they dance like wild bees.
—Excerpt from Emma Karnes’ poem, Dreaming Pretty Girls with Stinky Breath.

The internet tells me Emma Karnes finished high school in Ithaca, NY in 2016 and went to the University of Virginia, where she majored in English with a concentration in Poetry Writing. She became involved in climate concerns and led a research team focusing on anti-mining resistance in Ecuador. She’s now a union organizer in Rhode Island.

Without knowing either of them, I celebrate both the poet and the person who keeps that telephone pole and chose the poem. I imagine them dancing like wild bees, and I see that our world is a better place for the two of them.