Amie Whittemore and Her Kankakee Mallow (The Tattooed Poets Project)

Today's tattooed poet, Amie Whittemore, is also a prior contributor. She appeared here before, in 2018. She sent us this photo:

Amie tells us:

"This tattoo is special to me on several levels. First, it is of a Kankakee mallow, the only extant wildflower native only to Illinois; it was considered extinct before a pocket of it was discovered on Langham Island in the Kankakee River a few years ago. Kankakee is my home county and my parents live on the river so it felt like the perfect tattoo to get to capture my love of home. Obviously, I also wrote a poem about this magnificent flower.

I also got the tattoo in a former home. A house where I lived in Portland, Oregon in 2003-2005 became a tattoo studio (Oddball Studios @oddballtattooery) after my roommates and I moved out. While I was in Portland for AWP 2019, my old roommate and I visited the house-turned-studio and Sarah Crosley (@sarahecrosley) worked her magic. It was surreal seeing how the house had transformed; and now that past life, even the idea of getting a tattoo, feels even more distant, on the other side of the chasm of the pandemic."

Amie also sent the following poem, which originally appeared in The Heartland Review:

Don’t be Shallow, Vote for the Mallow

Slogan promoting the Kankakee mallow, the only surviving wildflower native to Illinois, found in Kankakee County and considered endangered, as its state flower (Habitat 2030).

Bright blister, bold break

in the brush of alien

honeysuckle, rarest

perfume in a disaster

of farmland, groping

for sunlight, recluse

requiring fire

to suss your seeds

dormant for decades

on Langham Island,

chewed bubblegum,

pink cap, drowsy

trumpet, your fan club

guards, films, and undresses

your flanks of scrub

so you’ll sidle up the sky.

These weekend naturalists

arrive by canoe to strip

weeds, count your seeds,

then eat bologna at noon—

faux meat the same color

as you. Hinge in the thicket,

foxed cream, leaves

the champagne of green things,

like any secret, your needs

outpace your means—

as you know. You’re no

fool. You shimmy

as if your near extinction

was a dream. The crew

goes to bed smelling the hem

of your pink skirt, lips

buttered with your velvet.

Nice work, you lucky flirt.

~ ~ ~

Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press) and the 2020 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.

Thanks to Amie for coming back to us and contributing more work to the Tattooed Poets Project on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2020 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoo are reprinted with the poet's permission.

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