Poetry by Scott Dalgarno
for Lucie Brock-Broido
When I was very young every once in a while there’d be a black-n-white report on television of some child that had fallen down a well or who had gotten stuck in an impossible crevice somewhere deep in the earth and all day and half the night it would go on while regular programing would be interrupted and people would watch for a while and then go on about their business but their thoughts would be with the child way down in that hole as if it were their niece or their son or themselves—you’d be out at some public event or you’d be shopping and your mother would ask if anyone knew the latest on the child and we would all suddenly just for a day be one human family; then in the night sitting on the floor in your pajamas you’d be watching as the news people searched awkwardly for something new to say when finally the announcer’s voice would rise and “Look!” said your sister pointing as someone would lift the child out dazed by the quartz lights trembling limp and thousands in the country would be bawling their 1950s heads –off—even your father.
Scott Dalgarno counts himself fortunate to have seen his poems in APR, The Yale Review, The Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, America, Cagibi, and The Oregonian. His poem “Small Pleasures” placed second in the 2024 Oregon Poetry Association Prose Poem contest. His volume, Third-Class Relics, was a finalist for the 2024 Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award and will be published by MoonPath Press in 2025. He lives among firs and dogwoods near Portland, Oregon, where he works for the resistance.