Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

Us ‘n’ Nature

We didn’t love fragrant petals awfully much

Beasts we couldn’t create ongoing connection with

Pelts had beauty, but we weren’t interested in collecting

Most determinations we would have been OK if they were never made

Truly it was all an experiment in continuing to have a good time at everyone else’s expense

Could you stop tending to strangers?

Could you let a badly prepared meal fall out of your mouth, back onto the paper plate, while conveying confidence in the uncorroborated petitioner?

Gone are the days of leaching lye out of wood ashes

Each morning we list our grudges in a note then delete the note

At the end of the week we read through all our deleted notes until we’re furious enough to overturn a freshly laid table which we do

People wait more calmly when they know everyone else has also been waiting everywhere, from forever ago, and their waits have counted nothing toward a guarantee of a future end to the wait

We haven’t put

a historical plaque on it yet, she says

Just this laminated sign reading

“Please do not climb

on this artifact. It is

not safe.”

Jacqueline Waters is the author of Commodore and One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t, both from Ugly Duckling Presse, and A Minute Without Danger, published by Adventures in Poetry. Her work has appeared in Chicago Review, Harper’s Magazine, the PEN Poetry Series, and on Poets.org. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, she lives in New York City and works on the digital team at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Her fourth book of poetry, The Fry, comes out in April 2026 with Winter Editions.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx