On Jonathan Fink’s Graves
by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
Hi. I’m Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, a poet born in Amarillo, here for Poets on the Plains. I’ve got coffee on the table and I’m sharing a poem with you by another High Plains Texas-born poet, Jonathan Fink, whose work encapsulates nuances perhaps only known by those familiar and whose family also lived and wrote this place.
Jonathan Fink was born in Lubbock and raised in West Texas. His poems have been recognized by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Joshua Tree National Park, and the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs.
He currently lives in Pensacola, Florida, where he is Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing at the University of West Florida and the poem I am drawn to read for you today, “Graves,” is from his most recent book of poetry, Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart, published by Dzanc Books, just this year.
Graves No one would choose this earth for his home— the parched dirt tempered by drought, mesquites rooted as teeth from unremitting wind. The headstones here lie flush to the ground, all vases inverted and sheathed in stone. My mother has removed her heels and stands above her father’s grave. With stocking toe she marks the plots where I, my father and brother will lie. Think of the nothing all prophets have claimed, dust from dust, a grain of sand. At rapture, this field will be a stubborn pry—our hair and nails rooting even in death, without rain or air, provision or light.
Don't Do It--We Love You, My Heart (Dzanc Books, 2025)
https://jonathanfink.com/dont-do-it-we-love-you-my-heart/
I love how this poem begins with an ending of sorts, a declaration the narrator situates as a wholly undesirable place, a thirsty place, parched. A place of reckoning, shaped by drought and wind, one where mesquites are “rooted as teeth” holding on through their extensive tap root systems, embedded to hold steady, perhaps ready to bite in some effort to stay secure. It’s unrelenting, this place, and perhaps what is attached to it, as well.
The next two lines bring us into the necessity of our presence, it’s not just desolate and dangerous, there’s a graveyard around us. People have succumbed, fallen. And like the mesquite’s roots, the empty flower vases, overturned and held in place by stone as if nothing weaker would do the work. The image of headstones here lying “flush to the ground” reminds me of hearing the regional flatness referred to as something you could dig six holes into and shoot pool, and I can easily imagine this place where flesh dissipates, and bones stay homed being easily overlooked by a passerby.
Here, we have someone with kinship, relationship, whose mother is doing something that is at once simple and remarkable. She removes her heels, dealing with the very earth where her father was laid to rest, and gestures where our narrator, Jonathan Fink, their father and brother are intended to take their final resting place, as well. For me, she is engaging with the place in a psychic, mythical gesture, as though endowing and anointing the intended burial spaces with her own body, at its closest point her “stocking toe” directing an intended attachment for her partner and their descendant generation in the living world now.
In the closing, the narrator perceives what we’ve come to and validates it with a negation, “Think of the nothing all prophets have claimed, // dust from dust, a grain of sand.” Expanding with a new declarative in a cinematic moment of their own demise joining the interred in a place without much yet rooted at extreme depth through their own “hair and nails” becoming reaching roots, tapping so deeply, any powers that be will have a tough time of bringing anyone up again. Leaving us with a sense of assuredness this earth is a stronghold for this family, despite appearances.
I’m indebted to Jonathan Fink for such a lovely poem and happy to share this with you today.
Thank you for being with us for Poets on the Plains. I’m Allison Adelle Hedge Coke and I was born in the yellow city, Amarillo, and I’m coming to you now from a short drive off Hwy 66.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born in Amarillo, lived/worked in seven High Plains states, and four more Great Plains states and provinces. She lives and works in California, came of age in North Carolina, and has also lived/worked in Hawai‘i, New Mexico, Michigan, New York, Tennessee and Georgia. She’s authored and edited 18 books including Look at This Blue: an assemblage poem and Burn (written at Marfa during the 2011 fires). Acknowledgements include the Thomas Wolfe Prize & Lecture, California Legacy Artist, the George Garrett Award, Fulbright Scholar, the First Jade Nurtured Sihui Female International Foreign Poetry Award, a U.S. Library of Congress Witter Bynner fellowship, and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. She teaches for the University of California Riverside. Books: https://hedgecoke.com
FEATURED POET
Jonathan Fink was born and raised in West Texas. He currently lives in Pensacola, Florida, where he is Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing at University of West Florida. His most recent book of poetry is Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart (Dzanc, 2025). He has also received the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review, the McGinnis-Ritchie Prize for Nonfiction/Essay from Southwest Review, the Porter Fleming Award in Poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Joshua Tree National Park, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and Emory University, among other institutions. His poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, Narrative, New England Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, and Witness, among other journals.
.https://jonathanfink.com/
https://jonathanfink.com/dont-do-it-we-love-you-my-heart/
https://uwfpoetryarttrail.com
finkjon@gmail.com
