I Want to Be the Largest Animal That Was Never Missed Once She Became Extinct

poems by

Renée Rossi

~ 76 pages, $14 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: May/June 2025

An Advance Sale Discount price of $8 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $13/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

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Renée Rossi is a poet, physician, artist, and mother. She is the author of Triage (Lost Horse Press, 2016) and three poetry chapbooks including Motherboard and Still Life, winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Award. Currently, she grows gardens and teaches integrative medicine, combining western and holistic medicines, and lives in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

“…no stars. But she has waited long enough and can see stars in daylight. She has given everything: blood, milk, muscle, sinew and bone.” Renee Rossi, poet, mother, daughter, surgeon, artist, lover, seeker, gives us this deeply insightful volume, lyrical/muscular, personal/universal, mythical/quotidian, existential/corporeal, “I want to be the T-cells whipped into action in the dying storm of the universe’s wounds,” courageously mining the interstices of intimate relationships, and the complexity of our human condition. ~Doris Ferleger, author of As for the Kiss

Renee Rossi’s poems are steeped in the natural world, science, medicine, and the chaos and beauty of human experience. Poems that contemplate forever chemicals, the sperm and the egg, marriage, and aging appear in exciting conversations with another Vermont poet, the great Ruth Stone. Renee Rossi’s new collection is a dynamic and inspired achievement. ~Jan Freeman, author of Blue Structure, Simon Says, and Hyena 

Sometimes, A Woman Stands Up

“Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Her arms must be pale. Mid-supper, a woman
removes a glass from the shelf and breaks it on the floor.

She takes off her apron, it may be a gown. No longer
a mother. Finger pads rubbed raw,

she puts on her coat and touches the door.
There might be a late autumn wind whipping outside,

thrashing what few dead leaves hold steadfast
to swaying limbs. For it is dark, and still

no stars. But she has waited long enough and can see stars
in daylight. She has given everything; blood, milk,

muscle, sinew, and bone. The lake laps at her feet,
wanting to take more of her shoreline. Maybe her toes

have never felt floorboard grain this way. She knows
of the six tastes, salt is the only one a human cannot live without.

And how it dissolves in a boiling pot, how it concentrates
in tears, how tears carry crystals of the mind’s sorrow and fear.

There is an herb called Ashoka that takes away a woman’s sorrow,
its red bark given to a woman after the loss of a child, husband

or a dream. It helps bind that empty space in the womb, that wide
open space in a Rousseau painting where a young maiden touches

a green leaf, thinks of a lover and the silent kingdom, and a lioness
stares back at her. What she’s never held, she does not know how to let go of.

And there may be a temple somewhere with a priestess swinging a censer,
the smoke coasting along the flight path of swallows. It reaches her.

Tangerines

After the snow settles, your father has an exotic job
growing tangerines in a valley where you see snow-

capped mountains but the climate is temperate
and your mother paints clouds and is never sick.

But your real grandfather enrolls your mother in secretarial school,
so she looks for a new world in her own personal snow globe

and leaves home to have a baby. We’re all inside that
snow globe: father, mother, swinging crib, house

with pine tree and unattached garage. Your memories
start in preschool when you fall off a piano bench

and the world grows sparkly. Or at age four.
when Kennedy’s death plays over and over on TV

and all the ladies cry. And wear those hats. Your mother never wore
one of those hats. You were born under a dark moon

so inside the glass it’s dark memories appearing
first. Snow globes were invented accidentally

when a scientist, trying to create a brighter light bulb,
took semolina and poured it into a glass globe—

the effect reminded him of snowfall. But,
artificial snow, being enchanted, is a company secret

and when children show up at the snow globe factory,
they must be mesmerized, eyes wide open

as they start shaking the globes all at once—
and the snow, depending upon the phase of moon, falls

everywhere, everywhere, but never melts and never sticks.

The Late Madness

Springtails dance and jump
as sun warms the snowpack
and cutworms drop from maples,
plump into piles of it,
a snow grayed and browned
to mud and slosh.

I’m mired to my bones
in the late madness of a long winter,
expecting the night freeze
to turn it all to ice again. I see
snow fleas dance on drifts.
This fifth season is like an extra

illness tacked onto life
instead of spring. I remember
my first time snowshoeing
out to tap maples, expecting
syrup to flow straight from the tree,
thick and sweet as honey.

On Whales & Marriage

Belly up in frothy foam, there
it is, a whale, thirty feet from shore
with a seagull perched sentry
on its chambered stomach.

Look. A seagull on a whale
bobbing in the waves.
You say I must be imagining
creatures, flotsam, sea ghosts.

I grab binoculars wanting you
to believe there’s a dead whale
floating in our sea, and its vomit
can transform into ambergris.

Can you fathom that whale puke
ages over time, taking on sand
and sunlight, minerals and salt, to create
such a sweet, earthly scent?