Padding Loamy on a Brew of Earth
Published by Bottlecap Press (2025)
POETRY CHAPBOOK. Padding Loamy on a Brew of Earth is a lyrical reckoning with identity, displacement, and the quiet negotiations of love. In this intimate chapbook, the poet reflects on her time as a young MFA student in London, where an unlikely romance led to an elopement and a new life in a remote Scottish Village on the edge of the North Sea. These poems confront the alienation of being foreign and the complexities of forging connection across difference. With language as rich and textured as the soil beneath her feet, the poet invites readers into a world where love and identity are tilled, turned, and tenderly unearthed.
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Example Poem
He jokes it was a beast.
I believe him,
foreign American pencil skirt,
imagining a snuffling
creature in the ancient
pines, padding loamy
on a brew of earth.
An animal of witness
unseen in the murk,
winding walks of the braes
wilding the village,
gathering keeks of the river,
the sea, the smell of wetness,
me sinking in my knee-highs,
sky half-cast like a squint.
I’m at the butcher's
on the corner in the square.
Smell of knives and greasepaper.
Smell of organ-grinding, anatomy,
black peppercorns.
A smile like pasture in his
blood-stained pinny.
The butcher hands me what I ask for,
a parcel of minced heart, liver,
and oatmeal, neatly tied
with twine. I boil it
in a pan, stuffed with disbelief
and spice. My Scottish husband says I’m
too gullible. The pudding steams
like field dressing, sliced across
the middle. I prefer the legend,
a creature given up for lost.
© Tori Grant Welhouse