​

Toni La Ree Bennett

​
 

Two Figures in Dense Violet Light

             (inspired by a Wallace Stevens poem title)

 

are looking at something one of them holds 

in her hands, cupping them to keep 

from losing this treasure, whatever it is—

 

both figures leaning over the hands

cupped in the shape of an ark

the violet light bruising the skin

the weight of the night obliterating form

forcing the women to embellish the faint

shape with their shared memories. 

 

You and I will never know what it is

and why it was worth holding

but come

 

let me show you what I have.

​

൪

 

I became a poet the day after I passed the last of my Ph.D. exams. I no longer wanted to write analytically and critically. No longer could. I have been writing poetry ever since as well as manipulating photographs into art, and painting. I taught English composition, drama, and

children’s literature for five years at the University where I received my degrees.  

 

I hadn’t written or submitted any writing since the pandemic began and just recently am revising

and submitting. During isolation, I got into art history and not content with being jealous of the artists whose work I was studying, I started doing my own drawing, watercolors, collage, and acrylic painting. That reminded me how incredibly talented those people were and I am not. But I have managed to come up with a few things I like hanging on my walls and may even start submitting some art to journals.  

 

Over the years, I have had a nice assortment of poetry published, including a chapbook and have

been able to get many photographs into literary journals, sometimes as the cover image.  

 

One of my favorite inspirations for writing poems came when I decided to look at some of my favorite poets’ poem titles, making sure they were poems I had never read, and then writing my own poems based on their titles. The poem in this issue of ൪uartet is one of those. The poets whose titles

I stole were Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and William Carlos Williams. I couldn’t use T. S. Eliot because I’ve read everything he ever wrote that was published.  

 

Looking forward to a trip to London this year after not traveling internationally for twenty years, to make more memories, get more ideas for poems, and take more photographs.  

 

—Toni La Ree Bennett

​

Heather L. Davis

 

 

The Pale Pink Ceramic Mug for Instance

 

There’s a reckoning at the edges of things, what hangs 

            in the balance, teeters 

on the brink—the pale pink ceramic mug for instance

            set barely deep enough 

on the counter not to plummet, its shape static 

            and intact—a miracle.

The bodywash about to slip from the tub’s slick 

            rim to the floor. 

These are the objects she leaves in the wake 

            of seventeen, 

on the cusp of flying from home, six months 

            and she’ll be gone, 

taking familiar compulsions with her, the ones 

            we pretend to ignore, 

little hops across the room or glances up as if 

            something demands 

attention, her gaze so convincing you might 

            follow it and wonder 

what, what? How I will miss the clockwork 

            clearing of her throat, 

so subtle you could mistake it for your own. 

            In the fridge, we discover 

what’s loose—milk caps left untightened, set 

            roughly in their place, 

food barely wrapped. Some call it quirky or 

            eccentric, but this 

is genetic inheritance, everything her mind 

            tells her to do, 

everything she can’t control, teaching us–

            mother, father, brother–

the value of precariousness, that almost loss. 

 

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​

Although I’ve experienced mental health challenges at various points in my life, I’m the lone neurotypical in a household of neurodivergent people. I adore my neurodivergent husband and

kids—I am fascinated by how their minds work and how they navigate challenges like OCD, Tourette’s, and ADHD. My daughter is one of the most poised people I have ever met, despite her struggles with social anxiety and a constantly changing set of compulsions. I wanted to capture her “edginess” in a poem, how we love so much about her--including her OCD--and how gracefully she navigated the journey toward college while her dad and I dreaded that transition. 

​

My writing comes in fits and spurts and I am always trying to figure out how to wedge it between full-time work and motherhood, so I typically think about images or lines that come to me for a

long time before I commit anything to paper. My kids are my top priority—I won’t lie—but the writing is always there too, waiting for me in the early morning or late at night. 

 

Other poets who inspire me range from Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich to

Martín Espada, Natalie Diaz, Chen Chen, Kim Addonizio, Kenny Carroll, Joel Dias-Porter, Regie Cabico, and many more. I prefer writing that is plain-spoken and concrete but also playful and politically bold. My reading is scattered, like my writing, but I grab onto poems when I can like they are mini-gliders ready to fly me out over the landscape and so I can enter a new world, see things from a different perspective.

 

—Heather L. Davis

​

Kathleen Gregg

​
 

LOVE IN ABSENTIA

 

Their images appear 

            on my iPhone screen:  

                        expat son and his wife smiling

 

sleepy-eyed, Christmas day 

            in China almost over, mine

                        just beginning.  In the background, 

 

tree lights shimmer, 

            boxes and gift wrap scatter

                        the floor.  Holiday traditions embraced

 

by my Chinese daughter-in-law,

            like a hint of home for Nate.

                        He takes me on a virtual tour 

 

of their Westernized condo,

            white couch, red chairs, a wall

                        of framed black and white art photos,

 

tiled balcony draped

            with strings of tiny lights,

                        exotic plants, two lounge chairs, 

 

skyline view, a glimpse

            of Guangzhou, of their life.  The lilt 

                        in his voice, his laugh, suddenly floods

 

my eyes, constricts my throat,

            like a lost memory catching me 

                        off guard; a gulf of more than just miles.

 

 

No choice.  I take what I can get,

            cherish our technology-driven 

                        closeness.  In touch, without the touching.

​

൪

 

I fell in love with poetry in my early sixties. The distilled, sensual language, the tension between

what is expressed and what is left unsaid, the way form can fit the emotional breath of a poem

deeply stirred me and spurred me into unsheathing my own creativity.

 

I consider myself to mostly be a narrative poet. I strive to draw my readers into the heart of the

story; make them see it, hear it, smell it, feel it. I want them to shake their heads and murmur, yes.  

I want to leave them breathless. That is the challenge, the love, that pushes me to write my truth

and send it out. I want to connect with readers the way the Affrilachian poets do, the way Margaret Atwood, Rita Dove, Katerina Stoykova do. I want my children and grandchildren to be proud of

me, and show them that life as an older person can be full of promise.

 

—Kathleen Gregg 

​

Sandra Kacher

​
 

Wisdom

 

At twenty,

you know your pliant body

will never stiffen,

refuse to believe 

that tears and laughter 

will track your flawless 

face.

 

But you already know

that everything wants to touch.

Bees dive thorax-deep

into lavender blooms,

the breeze through summer’s open window

caresses your nipples

as you explore the unlined face

of the lover who warms the pillow beside you, 

the one who will stay 

until stalactites and stalagmites

consummate eons of desire, 

kiss at last after their ten thousand year 

flirtation.

 

The first bang was a scattershot,

but every solitary neutrino

whizzing outward on its lonely journey

remembers the before time

when everything nested.

​

൪

 

At twenty, I first read the line “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near”

(Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”). You might think that twenty is too young to begin

thinking about mortality but it appears that I was born old and a bit melancholy. I believe there is a touch of the hurrying chariot in everything I write. There is also longing for the lost best place so it

is a bit difficult for me to write poems of delight, although I really enjoy Ross Gay’s poetry and envy him his joyful outlook.

 

I’m a nature poet if we can include human nature in that concept. I was a psychotherapist for thirty years because I’m fascinated by our minds, and, more so, our souls. I’ve always been interested in meaning expressed in the concrete, always chased symbols and Archetypes. I’ve written narratives—

I have three unpublished mystery novels in a file in a closet—but poetry is the most effective way for me to play around in the hidden dimensions.

 

I’m particularly interested in the way poetry connects us to each other and am thrilled when I find a poet who seems to share my inner world, currently Dorianne Laux and Ellen Bass, and Mary Oliver,

of course. Like her, “I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement” (Oliver, “When Death Comes”).

 

I’m delighted that Quartet has accepted my poem, “Wisdom.” And look forward to seeing it in

digital print.

 

—Sandra Kacher

Jacqueline Kolosov

​

​

Lunar Eclipse

 

Foraging beneath 
the leafless mulberry, a lone
Junco, charcoal silted gray

 

as the penumbral moon
seen through four a.m. light
on snow.
                        Just beyond

the horses, prick ears tipped 
with shadow, step forth 
to greet me, synchronized 

 

nickers followed by one long 
baritone neigh—
A tickle of whisker, and the gelding

 

nuzzles my arm. I break the scrim 
of ice, place fresh hay on red ground. 
Irrational, perhaps, this feeling 

 

time has no purchase here, 
the Junco soon joined by mourning 
doves, half a dozen skittish sparrows 

and two of his own dapper kind. 
Every now and again they erupt 
into cheeriest chipping chatter. 
 

Beside the dozy dove, the Juncos 

are a club of charcoal-vested 
philosophers sifting through 
 

the day’s concerns, until 
                                   they’re off in a fuss

 

only to return and re-settle   

unprepared to surrender 
this place and move on…

​

൪

 

The poems to which I return possess precise images. Even if such images tend towards the surreal or abstract, they always strike me as absolutely true, enabling a way of seeing that both reveals and deepens the mystery everywhere around us, the music inherent in these images amplifying their power and beauty. Among my very favorites are Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” and her beautiful poem-fairytale-bedtime-story, “The Moose,” which I read to myself for reassurance and comfort that all will be well, even if I sense it may be otherwise... A very different poem is “The Winter Beach at Sanderling” from Stanley Plumly’s Middle Distance, a sonnet about creating and dying, that appears near the end of the collection. The last two lines pierce each time I read the

poem, and then there is the closing pair of images:

 

                                                                              …each

              day rising and thinking I died for some kind of beauty,

              standing in the morning on the height of my deck,

              trying to wake up, nothing but my eyes to go by—

              how dark down does the water go before the tide— 

              I the god of starfish fallen, the flounder’s whiter bones.

                                     

In my own poems, I can only keep reaching for something like the music of “how dark down does

the water go” and “nothing but my eyes to go by—” 

I will say that “Lunar Eclipse,” like the poems cited above, focuses on other animals and birds. At the time I wrote it, I was living on 2 ½ acres of land with my horses, one of whom, Apollo, reoccurs in

my writing. It rarely snows in West Texas where I now live, and that hushed, white morning

brought the curious wonder of horse and smallest bird into focus, something I’ve attempted to do here.

 

—Jacqueline Kolosov

​

Jane Edna Mohler

​
 

"Bringing in the Sheaves"

                   —gospel song, Knowles Shaw, 1874                    

 

At the Mennonite thrift shop, I’m harvesting 

old silk ties for a project. 

 

Elbow deep, I feel around in musty mounds 

of flannel shirts and quilted barn vests.

 

Ties settle to the bottom in groups, like snakes 

snarled under matted straw.

 

Christian soft rock plays while the chaff 

of Sunday dinners sheds into the air.

 

Now other shoppers hurl plaids, paisleys, 

and regimental stripes into my pile. 

 

Opening a bland gray tie, I find it’s lined 

with a pert photo of a puckered-up pinup.

 

I put it back, 

giving it the chance to cause another stir. 

 

We shall come rejoicing.

​

൪

 

I’m a lifelong poet with large gaps of silence in my midlife. For over three decades I worked as a counselor in many different settings where I listened to the bone-truths of my clients. I am

comforted by the quotidian and fascinated by the ways we endure the challenges of life. 

 

My poem, “Bringing in the Sheaves” was written about a true experience. This is a rare jubilant

poem for me. When the other shoppers saw me collecting, they joined in by hurling ties into my

pile. It was an unusually large haul. I checked the labels on each tie because only the silk ones would work for my project. That’s when I found the centerfold lining in the tie. I thought the lyrics from

the old hymn made a perfect frame for the incident taking place in a religious establishment.

 

Most recently I’ve been reading Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things. I love the intimacy I feel when reading her work. She speaks to me like an earnest friend joining me for coffee. I aspire to the grounded poems of Charles Simic. I’m also taken with “Asian Figures” in W.S. Merwin’s collection of translations, East Window. Merwin describes the Figures as brief, “irreducible and unchangeable.” Now that’s a writing goal!

 

—Jane Edna Mohler

​

Daune O'Brien

​

​

The Autopsy

 

I punish myself with the autopsy report— the exactness of it. 

 

An inventory: 

comparisons

averages

colors 

thicknesses

 

I can hardly bear the weights and measurements,

the cataloguing of body parts as if he were not a whole person. 

 

As if he did not use his hand 

connected to his arm 

connected to his shoulder to toss a ball with me on warm summer afternoons. 

 

As if he did not use his feet 

connected to his leg 

connected to his hip to take that long walk with me going nowhere. 

 

As if he did not use his belly 

connected to his torso 

connected to his soul to laugh and laugh and laugh. 

To laugh and laugh and laugh. 

 

The autopsy report is a study in biology

an arrangement of words 

disconnected

from the hot summer night in August 

when his body slipped quietly 

into the backyard pool and filled with water 

under the watchful eyes of a million yellow stars 

the only witness to his final earthly battle

a symphony of cicada wings

a parade of fireflies 

maybe the neighborhood fox.

​

൪

 

After a long period of grief related to my father’s death, I immersed myself in nature. Hoping the oceans, mountains, and forests would quiet my mind, I rediscovered poetry instead. Poetry turned

out to be a different sort of quieting, but healing all the same. Writing creatively about grief helped deepen my understanding of loss and the complexities that persist long after the premature death of

a parent. "The Autopsy" was drawn from a place of profound disbelief, a grappling of sorts with the gruesome realities of losing someone to an addiction-related accident. At the same time, the poem resists common marks of stigma—the tendency to pathologize the departed. 

 

For creative inspiration, I tend to read as much as I write. Lately I have a hard time making the distinction—isn’t it all poetry? But I’m presently astonished by the work of Maggie Nelson and Kate Baer, who have a way of challenging my grip on astute observation and the rendering of sharp

details. 

I find myself in a season where these lines especially resonate:

These days

the world seems to split up

into those who need to dredge

and those who shrug their shoulders 

and say, It’s just something

that happened. — (Maggie Nelson, "These Days" excerpted from "THE CANAL DIARIES”)

“You can dance on the graves you dug / on Tuesday, pulling out the bones of yourself / you began to miss.” — (Kate Baer, “Moon Song”) 

 

—Daune O’Brien

​

Lisa Rhoades

​

​

Providence

 

This is a poem about growing older, 

a poem about visiting my hometown 

and yes, finding many things changed. 

My own body, for example,

cradling the muscle memory of location, 

gets distracted by roads widened 

or re-routed completely—Green Meadows for one, 

now ends in a cul-de-sac instead of trailing off 

into the gravel road we called the seven hills.

The last mile of the bus route our pack of kids—

the Walters and Coxes, the Rhoadeses and Walls—

would move to the back and bounce as the bus crested each

hill to make ourselves, just for a moment, fly.

When I came down hard on the seat’s metal frame

and got the wind knocked out of me,

John the driver thumped my back, 

and made everyone ride forward the rest of the year. 

 

I was still in high school when Providence was extended, 

and the bluff was blasted into a bright limestone cliff. 

The cell phone tower that breaks the horizon,

arms equal in length and wrapped

in fake evergreen, came more recently. 

Why do they try to camouflage them like that? Who looks up

and mistakes the tower for a tree?  Who else besides me

remembers the maple that stood there for years, catching

the morning light in early fall, blazing gold to red 

on this road named for the protective care of God?

​

൪

 

Poetry is the lens through which I see the world most clearly. I read and write for delight and companionship and in search of wisdom. I have the most amazing press mates—Aliki Barnstone, Liana Sakelliou, Elizabeth Cohen, and Cynthia Atkins just to name a few, and access to a daily writing group that includes Andrea Werblin, Christina Hutchins, Lindsey Royce and Agnes Vojta. Their books all are in my reading rotation right now! My desk sits before a window looking out on my front porch where mourning doves have built a precarious nest as they do every spring. When

the clutch hatches they will stretch their wings and practice on the porch rail before flying to the power line and then away. I am leading a lucky life.

 

—Lisa Rhoades

​

Jane Schapiro

​

​

Wing Hearts

 

As if their hues aren’t enough to get us to pray

we now learn they have between paper-thin scales, 

a blood-pumping, heat-pulsing, thermal-controlled heart. 

If you don’t believe me, Google butterfly hearts.

Look at pixeled wings and neon maps,

find each luminous orb wrapped in tissue 

like a garnet brooch. These wing hearts 

could make an atheist cede, lay down doubt 

like a well-honed sword. Like tiny prophets 

they summon craft—

write a psalm, a hymn, a bless…

wait         hear that?        sobbing      

my daughter 

but I trusted him

walking toward me, 

how can it be  

lays her head on my chest.

My heart, triggered, leaps from its trench, 

lurches, throbs, fires clichés:

better to have loved and lost/time will heal

tries to settle,

but adrenaline jumps in, 

save the prey.

 

Sorrow, loss—

forget the blessing,

who cares about butterfly hearts,

what matters is this heart darting 

word to word

searching for nectar.

 

൪

 

One of my biggest joys in writing is when a poem starts out in one direction and suddenly veers in a completely different direction, as this poem did. The poem was supposed to be a celebration of butterfly hearts and suddenly sorrow entered. I never know where a poem is leading me, and that mystery is part of the joy. There are times though when writing brings more heartache than joy. I have been writing for close to 40 years and have encountered moments when self-doubt becomes paralyzing. It seizes me and I wonder if writing is worth all the toil. Whether it’s a first line, a last line, or some painful revisions, writing is filled with challenges. And don’t even get me started on publishing. It was at one of these moments that I came across a poem by a wonderful poet named Hala Alyan. The poem is titled “Spoiler” and much of it deals with loss. She includes an image of a “magnificent sand castle” being built, and how a tide moves in, predictably and inevitably, and destroys it. Her final two lines shook me out of my paralysis: “I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in. / I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful."

Don’t despair, she seems to be reminding me, the act and intention of creating beauty is as

important as the creation itself. Maybe even more important. As a reader, I agree with Keats, "A

thing of beauty is a joy forever.” But as a writer I believe in sand castles. 

 

—Jane Schapiro

​

Kim Turner

​

​

Shadehill Court

 

Death enters quickly an abandoned house

to embrace all the objects left behind.

 

Once wary spiders stoutly venture out

to die in cobwebs of their own design.

 

Faint shadows of a lip imprint the glass

that poises parched and molded at the sink.

 

Pillows deflate, deserted by the heads

who wore the cases threadbare with their dreams.

 

Cracked spines of notebooks splay upon the floor.

Memoirs conclude without the authors’ pens.

 

Each clock reports its own disparate hour.

Slow second hands resist the final tick.

 

Unfailing light arrives each afternoon

to honor all the little graves within.

​

൪

​

Currently, I am exploring the ways loss and the hidden past are transferred between generations. I enjoy departing from form as much as I enjoy writing in it, but this poem, “Shadehill Court,” seemed to need a container to hold its sadness. It was inspired by the experience of entering my parents’

home to pack their belongings when they died four months apart after 63 years together.

 

I continue to discover how invaluable close observation is to the poetic process. Heather Sellers’ recent collection, Field Notes from the Flood Zone, beautifully highlights both the interior and exterior worlds we may overlook. Additionally, I admire the fearlessness of Carolyn Forché’s poetry of witness (“The Colonel”) and Dorianne Laux’s masterful use of metaphor (“Facts About the Moon”).  

 

For me, writing poetry is a hopeful process. Although I studied English Literature in graduate

school, it was years later that I began writing poetry in an attempt to capture and objectify my experience. It is exciting to think that a poem might remain when I’m gone, and while readers

cannot know me completely, I hope the experience and arrangement of words and images will resonate. I like the notion that the process might never be finished. 

 

—Kim Turner

​

Melody Wilson

​

 

Every Morning Leda    

                                    

I have no business studying swans. 

I already know what they are—

slow samples of beauty, patience, 

all of our best inclinations 

on a sheet of water 

or icing. Feet the orange 

of traffic cones, they stroke the pond 

with the self-assured dexterity 

of concert pianists. 

 

The first home we owned after 

a series of disasters had stood empty 

for a year. Bobcats peered in, watched 

me unpack. The howling was coyotes, 

not a woman down the road. But I had coffee 

and a window, and a bird so white, so enormous, 

stroked by. I could have counted its feathers 

if I believed it was true. Then gone. 

 

Impossible. Like the swan 

on the cover of my sister’s daughter’s 

Mother Goose. Bespectacled granny, smiling. 

A baby reaching—such an assumption. I was jealous, 

I admit it—stole into the room when they visited.

At twelve, I had nothing left to do but 

switch off the lights once our parents finally 

extinguished themselves, so I swallowed

one of her Flintstones vitamins— 

brightly colored artifact of care. 

Then another. Now I know

 

the bird on the book is just a goose. The old woman 

probably a carnie. Swans make awful noises 

and each of their toes ends in a claw. 

It was a long time before I learned 

young girls are covered in scratches. 

No one tells you.

 

൪

 

“Every Morning Leda” is an interesting poem for me. It started from a prompt about a daily

activity; I chose having coffee. Then I remembered the morning a swan flew by my window in a new home, so I wrote about that. Then associations took over. The book, the vitamins, the allusion to Chanda J. Glass’s wonderful poem “Leda” all appeared unprompted. I love it when this happens, but

it doesn’t always lead to a poem that makes sense to anyone else. This is a major crux in my work at this point.  

 

I’m torn between guiding my poetry or letting it guide me, and by extension, worrying a great deal about who will (or won’t) understand. I hope to reach the point where it doesn’t matter, but I

remain concerned about whether a poem will find its audience. So, I’m consciously working to build my skills and gradually letting go. This poem is among my most natural, anchored in experience and memory with little to no intention. My unfiltered work alarms me a bit, but the alternative is worse. I’m grateful to ൪uartet for seeing something in it—even if I’m not sure what that is.

 

—Melody Wilson

​

Ellen Wright

​

​

Family Portrait with Silent Treatment

                                                                                                            

If you asked what made me

first try to write a poem

I would talk about dumbfoundedness.

 

I would tell you how, because I said 

my time and my body were my property, 

Roger decreed we had come 

to a parting of the ways,

and from then on made a point

of ignoring me altogether.

 

I would try to tell you how 

nobody would believe he was 

no longer my boyfriend,

least of all Mommie who kept

visiting him in his checkout line

at the Star Market where he worked,

and then hurrying home 

to tell me all his news. 

How she and his mother 

would sit at potluck suppers, 

like a pair of duennas behind their fans,

watching the young people 

and whispering how this might be 

the day we would really be 

getting back together.

 

And I would emphasize just how furious 

I was that my classmates and teachers 

persisted in referring to us as an item.

 

So, when Roger died, and Mommie 

came flapping onto the sun-porch

to interrupt my piano practice with her 

breathless news, I was enraged.  

I had known all about it for three days 

and wanted nothing to do with it.

 

She and the Quaker lady she had 

just got off the phone with 

had already lined up my share 

of tasks for the arrangements.  

From her quiver of protocol,

Mommie shot the barb that would

cancel forever any claim to a breakup –  

you’ll have to write his mother a note.

 

We had no conversation about the funeral.  

When the time came, my parents assembled 

at the door and sent me upstairs 

to change my dress. Then 

to exchange my sandals for heels.  

And then again to put on some stockings, 

and a girdle Daddy barked

at my rear end 

from the bottom of the stairs.

 

One at each elbow, they prodded me,

as if I were on wheels, into the circle 

of silent Quakers. Trundled me 

towards the receiving line where Mommie 

extended me, like a bouquet of gladiolas, 

to the sobbing mother.

 

Back in the car, Mommie became positively 

chatty, prattling about Roger’s aneurysm 

of which she had apparently become 

the co-author.

 

Afterwards, I escaped to my room 

and wrote about violence. 

I decried the war in Laos and Cambodia,  

the one our government wouldn’t admit to.  

I bewailed the Bomb that menaced my dreams. 

I mourned the plane crash that killed Dag Hammarskjöld. 

​

Then Mommie stole the poem I was trying to write 

and gave it to Roger’s mother.  

In light of his tragic death, 

my objection counted for nothing. 

What I had left was the dumbfoundedness 

I was trying to tell you about. 

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My favorite thing about writing poetry is the miracle of creating a poem where, before, there was nothing. Writing “Family Portrait with Silent Treatment” entailed a double ex nihilo factor because there never existed, in my family history, any common language to describe the incident in the

poem. The extraordinary absence of boundaries made it impossible for me even to tell what

happened to me. I have, without exaggeration, spent sixty years trying to overcome enough dumbfoundedness to write the poem my poem tells about trying to begin.

 

By trade I am a musician, so my survival doesn’t require me to be verbally articulate. By the time I attained middle-age, however, I concluded that I might have a happier life if I learned to manage my mouth (there are also times when it opens itself up and says way too much). My intuition suggested learning to write poetry. It is one decision I have never regretted. Not only have I acquired a means

of detaching myself from some traumatic memories, but I can reward myself, and, with any luck, the reader, with a poetic monument to the struggle. 

 

 —Ellen Wright

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Sally Weston Ziph

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Cuts from a Marriage

 

September: Chelsea Hospital, I sit outside, for weeks, watching leaves drop off the trees.

 

            Avoiding smoke in the banana-colored TV lounge. Can’t read, can’t think, words slip away.

 

Back at home, waves of panic   

 

October                                   November                               December

 

 

January: Throwing up on the side of the highway on the way to the hospital, in a blizzard on a 

 

            Friday night. 

 

 

                                    When we leave the hospital, I dress her in a Winnie-the-Pooh pink zip-up 

 

for newborns. 

 

            So tiny, her                  middle name is 

 

Pearl:   from the  Latin pirula, or “point of the nose.” 

 

Perla, perala. Berla, berala,

 

pirum, for “little pear,” 

 

perilla, “a pear-shaped ornament.” perolo, 

 

“a button or tassel of wool on the top and middle of a knit cap.” 

 

I have a silver tea set

 

                                      marbleized paper pencils from the Venice honeymoon

 

 

Six fake pearl necklaces in my jewelry box, one real.

 

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This poem is one of a series of “Cuts from a Marriage” poems (each with the same title) included in my recent MFA thesis (2021). I decided to finally go back to school to get my master’s degree in creative writing in 2019–something I’ve wanted to do since before my daughter was born. The low residency MFA program I attended allowed me the flexibility to keep my job as well as fulfill my dream. 

 

My daughter’s first child, a boy, was born in October 2020. Pandemic struggles aside, his birth reminded me of the thrill and drama that comes with naming a newborn. I’m also fascinated by etymology and the discoveries and associations one makes while tracing the history of words, and I enjoy creating patterns of sound, rhythm, and musicality in poetry.

Recent poetry books I’ve enjoyed, and feel inspired by, include the following: Natalie Shapero’s

 Popular Longing, Karyna McGlynn’s 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse, Leigh Stein’s What to Miss When, Mary Jo Salter’s Zoom Rooms, Aimée Lê’s Erectic Schlock, and Heidi Seaborn’s An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe. One of my favorite books to come

back to for inspiration is Dana Roeser’s The Theme of Tonight’s Party Has Been Changed. I’m

fascinated by the way she weaves multiple threads of narrative through poems that are both funny

and evocative of the anxiety that comes with being a woman in these contemporary times.

 

—Sally Weston Ziph

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