Editor's Note Section
Fall Issue 2024 Volume 4 Issue 3
Editor's Note
Today I pulled the 2024 solar eclipse glasses I got free from the library out of the backseat pocket of my car. I’ll be 89 the next time a full eclipse occurs and if I’m still here, these specs won’t be.
They’re the pair I dropped and lost in a driving rain (between the library and my car) which the librarian wouldn’t replace, and which I retrieved only after a car drove over them as I made my last dash to the car. I like to recycle, but I couldn’t have someone use these glasses in twenty years, their last sight the sun unfiltered through the tread of a Volvo.
What to lose, what to keep—isn’t that the preoccupation we have as people growing older and as poets? If we’re around long enough, our loved ones and friends will die before us. We can’t control that inevitability, but we can hold onto memories and to objects that hold meaning for us. I have kept my mother’s watch, but not her silver coffee service.
In poetry, such decisions are often less clear-cut. What we bury or animate, state or infer, affirm or negate are all influenced not just by our word choice and placement, but by line breaks, punctuation, alliteration, metaphor, simile or other devices that in successive drafts may be safe or face the ax. What we choose makes or breaks a poem.
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“In Praise of Spiderlings and Motherhood,” Grabel employs repetition to weave an ode that celebrates creation’s hard work.
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The short lines in Harrod’s “The Dull Edge of Husbandry,” enliven a couple’s disconnect and amplify the humor of her wordplay.
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In “Visiting My Dad,” Hexum uses four stanzas, each end-stopped and alternating between five and six lines, to create a soothing pattern to a situation both quotidian and quietly fraught with change.
What intention and precision. Sylvia Plath called poetry “a tyrannical discipline.” In this issue, our contributors reflect their grit through diligence and craft, the emotions they convey, the issues they unmask.
—Jane C. Miller
Poetry
Jill Barrie
Margaret at the Window
Margaret at the window
sees the rampant sun rise,
hears the wind hum
tunelessly as an old woman
who lives alone. Last night,
she heard an unknown beast
or bird cry out in pain.
Trains warned at crossings
as they pushed through the sprawl.
Sirens pierced the darkness
like auditory stars. Daybreak,
a red-tailed hawk sweeps
down from a pole to pluck
a vole from the lawn.
Rising, tail feathers spread,
blood on the horizon.
.
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Poets who have caught my eye, ear, and often my heart over the years include Ai, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, Gloria Fuertes, Jack Gilbert, Richard Hugo, Laura Jensen, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Robert Lowell, William Matthews, Marianne Moore, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath, Mark Strand, Tomas Tranströmer, William Carlos Williams and William Butler Yeats. I appreciate the craft in their poems, beautiful use of language and imagery, and the passion they imbue. I try to use these elements in my poems.
—Jill Barrie
Caroline Bassett
Halibut Dinner, Dingle, Ireland
A slab of white fish floating
on a pink sea of red pepper sauce,
cushioned on clouds of mashed potatoes.
No bones to catch in the throat.
In this land encircled by sea,
the long beauty of churches and forts
still stands after one thousand years.
An oratory of flat gray stones,
a door to the west,
a window to the east to look out upon
a hopeful rising sun, away
from a bleak, torn, ragged life,
away from the babes who slid out
and died soon after, unbaptized
and doomed to Limbo, buried
at night, a stone for a pillow,
in the flinty unconsecrated ground.
For a mother who knows her child
will never see God—
what a catch in the throat.
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“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky…”
These lines that begin T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” stay with me, many years after reading this poem for the first time. Also, “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” and “The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle upon the window-panes…”
An invitation to enter, repetition (the women coming and going), images (the yellow fog), the description of a rather pathetic figure, the ambivalent closure of drowning to human voices—this poem contains so much that I admire. And some things that I don’t too, such as the contempt for poor Mr. J. Alfred. I do not read this poem for solace except for the consolation that comes from the joy and the magic that poetry gives us.
Other poets that I read include Liesl Mueller, Wisława Szymborska, Jane Hirshfield, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney.
I wrote “Halibut Dinner” after a visit in April 2023 to Dingle, Ireland, as part of a sort-of retreat for my poetry group with our leader, Jude Nutter. She’s a prize-winning British poet who lives part-time in Ireland and part-time in Minneapolis, my home. I say “sort-of retreat” because we spent little time on poetry as words on paper and more as visuals to become words later on. So much beauty there and also the opposite: broken forts erected for protection during wars, for example, and for me the Gallarus Oratory (chapel), about 1300 years old, made of stone, has never leaked, but so barren and bleak a setting that I felt sorry for the families who lived on its grounds—and those dead babies buried with a stone for a pillow. Now that’s an image in need of solace.
—Caroline Bassett
Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt
Mirabile Dictu: Notre Dame in Flames
April 15, 2019
Obscene flames lick the flying buttresses,
claw at the latticework roof. Eight centuries old,
shrouded in black smoke,
the spire cracks like a matchstick,
topples—mysterium tremendum—
and is swallowed by the gaping maw.
All of Paris watches open-mouthed—
like the chimeras and grotesques
fastened to the cathedral’s corners—
impotent witnesses to the blessed
canopy’s destruction.
No amount of water can stop the fire.
Two centuries to construct,
the sanctum sanctuarium
surrenders in mere hours to the mammoth blaze.
Deep in the cathedral’s belly
sits the wooden, eight thousand pipe
Cavaillé-Coll organ: immovable, helpless.
But next morning—mirabile mysterium—
like Christ’s crown of thorns plucked
from the inferno, the instrument,
though coated in toxic lead dust,
is intact—mysterium tremendum et facinans—
protected by the vault above,
as if covered by Heaven’s wing.
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I write about what troubles or fascinates me. As I watched Notre Dame go up in flames, I poured my horror and disbelief onto the page. I was devastated by the toppling of the spire, especially at the beginning of Holy Week, when the cathedral should have been a sanctuary of peace instead of a blazing inferno.
I wove in Latin phrases from the liturgy of the Mass as echoes of the centuries of worship that have ascended from that iconic place. The poem moves from lament over what was lost to wonder over what was saved: especially the magnificent grand orgue. I love what Henry Miller said: “Either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird.”
—Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt
Charlotte M. Friedman
I give thanks
when I wake and he is not next to me
but already out the door, in the car, on his way
to an AA meeting at seven a.m.
while the water heats for coffee,
and I scoop kibble into a bowl, kneel down
next to our seven-month-old puppy, his dainty bites
as the bowl is emptied.
as he strains at the leash, pulls hard
toward a pile of leaves and my husband sits
in a folding chair in some church basement,
thermos resting on his knee, listening to strangers
struggling with sobriety, the holiday, family.
for yesterday at the breakfast table
when I reached for the Times spread out between us,
and he shared stories of men, some women, but mostly men,
who’d hit bottom, lost spouses/children/houses/jobs.
for his stubbornness and belief in change at 70.
for the days he might say
I never thought of that
that must’ve been hard
I didn’t realize you worried.
while I chop Brussels sprouts and chestnuts,
break open a pomegranate for the clear, red seeds
stir the onion, tear the bread, boil the yams
and he does not say, as he did last year and the year before
it doesn’t matter about the food.
when he comes in downstairs, this man
who never wanted a dog, and I hear him
not talking but cooing
you are the most beautiful dog in the world
yes, yes, you are.
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I am in my third marriage, as is my husband, and, needless to say, it is complicated. There continue to be surprises—good and bad—as well as great joy and heartbreak. Li-Young Lee’s Rose, Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap, and Margaret Gibson’s Broken Cup are a few of the collections whose explorations of intimate relationships I greatly admire for their bravery, tenderness, and honesty as well as their gorgeous language. I look to poetry as a place to puzzle, to remember, and to delve deeper into life. Poems always offer unexpected discoveries, and to share those with readers is a particular pleasure.
—Charlotte M. Friedman
Shelley Blue Grabel
In Praise of Spiderlings and Motherhood
after Christopher Smart
For I will illuminate Mabel, my porch spider, my Golden Orb Weaver
For I will extoll the elaborate charm of her dense circular web
For her daily spins and pulls from her own center
For the pods she crafts to contain her offspring
For the weeks she has spent outside my window
For being undaunted by my watchful face
For the yellow streaks down her busy back
For the way her limbs dance across the silk harp
For strapping her pods to different corners
For being more skilled than a sailor tying down his cargo
For the mysterious zipper line down center web
For her body as maker as material as source
For her motherhood is hailed in deep tufts of grass
For she is gone
For I will guard her spiderlings until they too are gone
For all of this I thank you Mabel, Orb Weaver, Argiope, friend.
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This past summer, late August, I was frozen in place by a recurrence of Mono. A gift from my 19-year-old self. I spent days in my chair watching through my window, an enormous Orb Weaver spider spin the most spectacular luminescent web I had ever seen. I spoke words of encouragement to her daily. I researched her species to better understand her lifecycle. I sometimes wish some of my ex’s had done the same for me, but that is another story, another poem.
We had quite a relationship, she and I, long term, lasting if you count it in spider years. I watched her pull silk and prepare pods for her children. I made promises to her. She knew me better in that moment than I knew myself. She distracted me from exhaustion and sore throats, body aches. I will never forget her yellow stripe down her back.
This is how I feel about the poetry that gets written through me, fragile as a spider web, strong as an iron rope. Always a contradiction.
—Shelley Blue Grabel
Lois Marie Harrod
The Dull Edge of Husbandry
. . . and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. Hamlet
She lent him her night
but he kept it
in the unfinished garage
with the tin cans
of rusty screws,
the empty Mason jars
bequeathed by his mother
and the hedge clippers
too dull to trim
the forsythia. She knew
when she asked for it back,
he would look at her
and say What night
are you talking about?
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A literary critic might say that Harrod’s poem “The dull edge of husbandry” uses many of her characteristic “devices” or mind patterns. Her title is a quote from Polonius’s bloated speech of clichéd advice to Laertes: “ . . . and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry,” and Harrod, whose parents read the King James version of the Bible to her and her sisters twice a day, learned to love language and doubt religion at an early age.
And such a critic would be right, for I see my poems as part of a long literary tradition which I love, quibble with, and sometimes deny. I like connections with what has been written; it’s where I began. I love puns and word play—not just because they amuse me, but because they create multiple meanings with their wacky dualities, ambiguities, double-talk, and puns. Words surprise and jolt me with implied insights.
In “The dull edge of husbandry” the surprise word was husbandry, which means, of course, the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops and animals. But husbandry also contains the word husband, which some wives like to care for, cultivate, and breed. So in this little poem about borrowing and lending, a wife lends the night to her husband. In this exchange, the night, like a pair of trimming shears, dulls with things that must have happened in the night. The husband misplaces what he borrowed. He forgets what he has done with the clippers, but if the poet is lucky, her reader sharpens Polonius’s snips. Her reader understands.
But how such meaning emerges as I write, I don’t know. I don’t even remember what came first—the poem or the title. I just write until the poem happens. Afterwards, I too understand.
—Lois Marie Harrod
Angie Hexum
Visiting My Dad
Sleeping in the guest bed,
windows open and door ajar,
my husband and I leave a margin
of cool mattress between us.
My father is nearly eighty
and likes it warm.
In the hallway, a nightlight
casts a yellow glow on the open
doorway to his room—
sleeping near him, a comfort
both familiar and foreign now.
In the morning, I wake
to find our door closed.
Dad must have risen before dawn
as he always does
to have his toast and coffee,
read the paper.
I didn’t need to see him grasp the knob
to know he turned it slowly, carefully,
to know he pulled it to
so the door just met the jamb
with a gentle kiss.
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I often have the sense that the world is not particularly clamoring for my poems. Sure, among the community of poets there is a passion for poetry, but for the public at large, I’d wager it ranks somewhere between cross stitch and throat singing. Yet, remarkably, I keep at it.
At first, I wanted to write for the usual reasons: I loved books, I yearned to say something that mattered, I thought writers were cool. In my early twenties, I tried writing a novel. It turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined it to be, so I put it aside and got on with my life.
It was sorrow that brought me back to writing. In 2015, my youngest brother overdosed the night before Thanksgiving. In the face of that loss, I found solace in reading and writing poetry. For a long time, I kept a Stanley Kunitz line on a notecard on my desk: “How shall the heart be reconciled / to its feast of losses?” Somehow those words gave me comfort, I suppose because they assured me I wasn’t alone in my pain.
I think it’s this sense of communion between poet and reader that draws me to poetry. A good poem feels like a window into the poet’s heart, whether the subject is some small beauty that moves them or the longing that unsettles their nights. My favorite poets are those that offer that interior glimpse in language that is both beautiful and accessible—Ted Kooser, Ellen Bass, Ross Gay, Ada Limón, and Danusha Laméris to name a few. If I ever doubt whether poetry matters, they restore my faith.
—Angie Hexum
Jeanne Blum Lesinski
Cento: Close to the Ground
Many things I do not think of,
but what I’ve glimpsed
I long for in my most hopeful of daydreams:
Thistleweed bursts open,
breaks and breaks and lives by breaking,
is set loose in the world,
over the yellowing, early-summer field.
Examine it closely.
Sometimes the river becomes the heart.
At times like these, we must learn
from watching animals who swim by instinct,
listen to the way honeybees drone
and hover in and of the mind.
Choose one word—
choose to keep it or not
and say it over and over.
Yes.
We will sleep within the muted infinity of each other.
Jack Ridl, “That’s Enough,” “The Enormous Mystery of Couples,” Li-Young Lee, “Epistle,” Brian Turner, “Jameel,” William Carlos Williams, “The Mind Hesitant,” Stanley Kunitz, “The Testing-Tree,” William Stafford, “Big World, Little Man,” “What If We Were Alone,” Elaine Seaman, “Joseph’s Coat,” Diane Seuss, “The Casket Company Is on Fire,” Conrad Hilberry, “Deaf Ear,” Gail Martin, “For My Mother, Afraid of Water,” Tim Seibles, “Something Silver-White,” Naomi Shihab Nye, “How Palestinians Keep Warm.”
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I read widely among the works of modern poets, and I participate in local and online poetry activities, which include workshops and readings at the Roethke House, the Saginaw, Michigan childhood home of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke [Ret-key]. In his poem “Open House,” Roethke wrote “My heart keeps open house.” Mine does too. This is clear in my debut poetry collection Tethers End and in subsequent poems, like my “Cento: Close to the Ground.”
At a Roethke Foundation sponsored workshop, I first learned of Marion Starling Boyer’s novel in verse, Ice Hours, which contains a cento poem. Cento is Latin for patchwork or collage and has been around since Homer and Virgil. During a workshop, Boyer provided participants with a list of poetry lines and their citations that could be used to inspire a cento. Each word in the cento poem must come from a previous source and that source be acknowledged.
As with most of my poems, I’m not sure exactly how “Cento: Close to the Ground” came about or what I was trying to say when I first pieced together the collage, literally pieced when I rearranged the strips of lines I’d printed out and cut apart. Upon later reflection and editing, I realized it is a love poem to an individual and to being in love with life enough to risk interactions with the world.
Innately an observer and input collector, I often joke that I’m a font of trivial knowledge. And now, more than ever, I’m likely to write down lines by others that strike me as particularly memorable from works that I read or hear, in case they should become an inspiration, epigraph, or quotation within a new work of my own.
—Jeanne Blum Lesinski
Mary Rohrer-Dann
The Good News
(after Thich Nhat Hanh)
The good news is: You can do it.
You can stretch out your foot, then
the other, walk the same route
with the dog, dodge the same
pavement cracks, pass the same winter-
weary trees and introverted houses,
gardens buried under last year’s scruff.
The good news is: You can enter
your dog’s dedicated alertness,
his bliss at every tree he lifts
his leg against, the paths of squirrels
and early robins he tracks, the crows
on the wire who recognize him and jeer
and he doesn’t care, just sniffs
the other dogs who have pissed
on the same trees, the winter-fattened
cats who have snuck across the street
to crouch beneath a parked car, watching
with narrowed amber eyes and fluffed fur.
The good news is, if you pay attention,
a curl of damp earth threads the air,
purple rockcress, bright as confetti,
fills the sidewalk seams, a gaggle
of yellow crocuses chatter
under the hedge, and now, see
how the sun edges the clouds in fire.
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Sometimes a poem is like a piece of sea glass you find at the ocean’s edge. It needs just a quick rinse in fresh water to reveal its artless self. This poem was one of those gifts, inspired during a spiritual writing workshop led by Donna Baier Stein of Tiferet Journal. To hold in my mind and heart both the world’s relentless suffering, and its miracles and mystery–that is my daily challenge. My aging pup reminds me to be awake to each moment. Even more, I am at my most fully open when with my fiercely, hugely alive granddaughter. Poetry, writing and reading it, helps me balance life’s anguish and fears with its utter gorgeousness and grace.
The deep humanity, spiritual intelligence, lyricism, craft, and sheer joy in language of Lisel Mueller, Louise Glück, Jane Kenyon, Dorianne Laux, Ellen Bass, Barbara Crooker, Lucille Clifton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, Enid Shomer, Yeats, Neruda (and so many others) inspire, guide, and ground me.
—Mary Rohrer-Dann
Lynne Schilling
A Dream Reimagined
Dreamt on my 75th birthday, 2021
Inappropriately dressed in a torn white shirt and painter's
pants, I join a faculty lunch at work. Inside the room, I see the
ex-dean’s Pekingese is peeing, once again, on the carpet. The
dean is scowling and sipping a dry Chardonnay while talking to
someone wearing a Richard Nixon mask.
I spot a woman propped against a door jamb. She has a thin,
flat circle for a head; the rest of her is made from overcooked
spaghetti. She doesn’t speak. Strange as she may seem to the
others, she is familiar to me. I carry her in front of me, over my
heart, bracing her so she can walk with me. She likes this,
smiling as we share our very substance—our bones, our blood,
our breath (such as she has).
Distracted by the barking dog, I stumble, dropping the woman
on her head. I shake her, fearing she is dead. She revives, but I
realize she has become too heavy for me to carry—a suitcase
over the weight limit. With a mix of regret and relief, I give her
to a sturdy woman with kind eyes and a clipboard.
I hurry out the door and take the first train home. I will build a
whole new level atop my current life. There will be walls of
windows and glass doors.
I will paint the sky.
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I am currently rereading Prayers of Little Consequence, the delicate and revealing poetry of Gilbert Arzola. He describes in his poem, “Why,” two of the reasons he writes: I write because I cannot shout / loud enough. I write because / I cannot swallow what is bigger than me. I feel the same, but I doubt I could have said it so beautifully. I also write because I have always loved words and images, and well, I can’t stop. Now 78, I started writing poetry in my thirties, but wrote only sporadically until a few years ago when I began writing most every day, and eventually started taking poetry courses, finding mentorship, and recently, an online writing group. The dream that resulted in the recently written “A Dream Reimagined,” was dreamt at the beginning of my writing renaissance. I didn’t realize it then, but the dream revealed my readiness to start writing as a way of life. Two bits of poetry often run through my mind. I love May Sarton’s poem, “Moose in the Morning.” In particular, these lines resonate: You set me free to shirk / The day’s demanding work / And cast my guilt away. / You made a truant of me / This moose-enchanted day / When all I can is see, / When all I am is this / Astonishment and bliss. I am also a big fan of Jack Gilbert’s, “A Brief for the Defense.” When the world seems too much or my life is clogged with problems, I think of this: We must have / the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless / furnace of the world. And it helps.
—Lynne Schilling
Kimbol Soques
before frost
Winter’s coming.
I’m harvesting basil.
Defying the odds of drought,
bleaching heat,
brick walls,
our basil crop soars past my waist, leafing
like fragrant umbrellas from April
until now.
On the day before frost —
this time it’s after Thanksgiving —
I take the pruners out the front door
and pull down the ebullient stalks.
I stretch the swath across the counter,
fish out a bowl,
and start pinching.
The girls wander from the back of the house:
Is it going to freeze tomorrow?
Are you going to make pesto?
Remember when there was so much we had to give it away?
You were elbow-deep in branches, that year.
Bruised, basil’s oil atomizes into
its final penetrating bouquet.
Tomorrow, we tuck ourselves beneath the straw.
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I'm sitting in a kitchen with two other poets, trying to remind myself what keeps me writing poems, specifically. I recently started a new vocation as a theologian — there's a lot of writing there — yet for me poem-writing remains essential. Distill me, and poems continue to drip out. Why? One thing: how I see and hold on to the world lends itself to poem-making. I notice, look again, examine more closely, weave it into what I know... and capture that in a poem, for later. An opposite thing: I often move through the world abstracted into my head... when my senses bump into the world's materiality, and I stop to say, oh right, wait, what is this, exactly? In a poem, I can pull myself down to the ground, even to the roots beneath the ground. Also, sometimes I wish we had telepathy, so we could swap experiences immediately and precisely. Then we wouldn't need to resort to poems. But we'd likely lose those wonderful gaps we fill in when we do resort to poems (reading them, making them)... we'd lose the way our own thoughts separate from us into something more. I keep writing poems because I keep snagging my fingertips on something more, and I have found no better way to hang on to More — not with theology, not with essays, not in conversation. And this More is as central to me as breathing. So I breathe, and write poems.
—Kimbol Soques
Elaine Sorrentino
Belly Dancing in a Brown Sweatsuit
The suit.
Chocolate-colored,
more milk than dark
with a light aqua line racing up the leg,
my little pop of femininity
in otherwise masculine attire
for an activity designed to make one feel
vibrant and sexy
after nine months of treatment.
They said wear comfy clothing.
The instructor.
Dark-haired, exotic, energetic,
smiles as she greets the class
while donning her multicolored hip scarf,
shimmies her torso,
her percussive movements rewarded
with jingling at every thrust.
Okay ladies, now you try.
We configure ourselves
in a line-dancing pattern,
mimic her gyrations,
uncertain how to make our hips snap
without appearing ridiculous and clumsy,
Let me show you again.
Arms crossed, women stand
like a row of angry Mr. Cleans
but with hair, they refuse to try it again,
preferring to watch her dance−
except for the brown-suited belly dancer
who’d already spent too much time on the sidelines.
I’ll give it a go.
The solo.
As I shove my stiff arms to the side,
like a department store mannequin,
move my hips in a circular motion
I hear laughter behind me,
a satisfying sound, preferable alternative
to surgery, infusions, radiation,
and I’m happy to provide amusement.
I didn’t come to watch.
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When I returned to poetry in my 50s, one of the first chapbooks I discovered was Zeina Hashem Beck’s 3arabi Song which featured poems of survival, music, and love during a time of war, unrest, and displacement in Lebanon. Her standout line “Give me your pain and I will break it into quarter notes” still moves me to this day. Much of my poetry incorporates humor, something that has served me well through challenging times such as divorce and cancer. I appreciate Billy Collins’ informal writing style, his offbeat, some may say “snarky,” method of expression to get across a serious topic, much in the same way I enjoy stand-up comedian Stephen Wright and his philosophical one-liners. I am also a huge fan of haiku and ekphrasis.
—Elaine Sorrentino
Alison Stone
The Moon Explains Her Conduct Toward Endymion
He’s hot, I wanted him,
I took him. I was lonely
in my canyon of sky.
Pulled from the drudge of sheep tending,
he got a good deal – forever firm-skinned,
muscles never losing tone.
You blather on about consent, but
by the way he gazed, he craved me.
No one else could love him like I do.
Besides, he asked for it, strolling alone
at night in his thin shepherd’s robe,
tossing blond curls. Everyone has needs.
I need to see beauty. My milky
eye can never shut.
I’m too old for flirty,
take-it-slow courtship.
Doesn’t love always
cast a spell?
That coy smile
never leaves his lips,
his hands open to receive
my offering of silver.
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I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. My first poem, written at age six, was to my beagle, “Your nose is wet and you’re my pet. You’re brown and white, you never bite…”
For a change I’m reading mostly fiction. I’m a quarter of the way through Middlemarch, which I read freshman year of college. I’m also re-reading Rita Dove and have just discovered Nancy Miller Gomez.
I’m helping my dog rehab after knee-replacement surgery, so during our long, slow walks I listen to poetry on YouTube. I just found a recording of the Forward Prizes from 2020.
I just published a book of formal poetry, Informed. Now I’m working on edits for my next manuscript.
—Alison Stone
Mundus Novus
A gutter is unmoored. The hairy fingers
of a tree root ball are exposed to the sky.
Wind-blown leaf debris obliterates
the distinction between street and sidewalk.
I move carefully on top of my memory
of the path and stumble at the forgotten
curb, but my daughters run ahead,
tossing their arms and legs and heads
like ponies released into the wild after
the hurricane. I follow their shrieks
as closely as I can because the old world
has been destroyed by rain and wind.
We venture into the new. We pass what was
the Lester place, long in foreclosure;
the banker in no hurry to end it all. Now
the storm has taken half the garage.
Across the street, Mrs. Berman’s perfect
ranch looks too disheveled to be out
in public without shame. The girls love it.
They run lines up and down the retired
geometry teacher’s lawn, pulling branches
and small logs into piles to stake a claim
with their labor. Next they find a new
shortcut to Johnson Park, but the park
is gone, swallowed by the river, dotted
with oaks ripped in half and a red slate
restroom roof skimming the top beside
a drowned dugout. The girls move
to the muddy river edge to study the surface
and yell sighting reports back to me
on the grass. I see Ric Lester walking
his fluffy mutt toward me from downriver.
I start to offer sympathy about the garage,
but Ric waves me off, whispers: “I’ve been
all the way down to the stables.” If we keep
going, he tells me, we will find nine drowned
horses, floating on the track where I used to
watch them trot grandly, faster, faster,
faster, their blinded heads straining forward
to win nothing they could ever have really
wanted for themselves. I won’t scan the river
for their bloated bodies. I have seen too much
already. I tell my daughters it is time to turn back
but they dance ahead of me in their rain slicks
of invincibility seeking out grisly details.
I call out to them again and again, but they are
too far away now, with too much glee, moving fast.
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I wasn’t raised among poetry lovers. I remember dutifully memorizing a poem (“The Duel” by Eugene Field) in 2nd grade by reciting out loud: “The gingham dog and the calico cat line break Side by side on the table sat semicolon …” No one even suggested to me this might not be the best way to approach a work of literature. I did well on the test that week, and my solid, lower-middle-class folks were proud of me, then and when I went on all the way to graduate school.
The first poem I remember loving was W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Art”: “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters …” Auden tells us in late 1938. Without directly mentioning the growing Nazi threat, he connects the cruelty of everyday life to the cruelty of war through hundreds of years of human history. The ability of poetry to make associations and lead us on imaginative and emotional journeys is still a miracle to me, and an aspiration.
“Mundus Novus” has its origin in the 1999 Hurricane Floyd, when the cruelty of climate change hit my New Jersey neighborhood very hard. Basements flooded along with parks and roads. Food rotted in useless refrigerators. Schools and offices shut down for weeks. And, yes, nine drowned horses were found in a public stable. This last horror seemed to capture our grief and helplessness spinning on a changing planet.
—S. K. Tatiner
Libby VanBuskirk
Invisible
Lights out. Clocks stopped.
I would reach for you, my love
if you were here
but alone
in darkness I fumble
chair to chair chair to
table
looking for the always that is not you
but should be.
How smooth the table’s top comforting
lamppost cool and slim
how strong I am at grabbing.
Door knob door jamb.
Kitchen’s cold dark water.
I drink the dark delicious my insides
chilled.
I feel the counter,
place
my invisible glass.
The nothing that exists
removes all I would rush to salvage
notebooks poems papers
dark unseen laptop lost in nowhere
and you.
In this blackout
our soft couch receives me.
No I won’t try each switch.
When light returns
with its fine vigor
what will still be here?
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Writing has long been central to my life, a forever-friend. I began writing seriously in college. After graduating from Wheaton, I won a national contest from Mademoiselle magazine which influenced my life. I interviewed T. S. Eliot. I was chosen to serve for a month as guest managing editor of Mademoiselle in New York, the position held by Sylvia Plath two years earlier. To have such experience when young gave me the confidence to fully follow my writing. This included many seminars and workshops, a source of experimentation, new skills, the learning of different forms, and growth through meeting other writers.
My writing has always been closely entwined with the natural world. Though I lived in the city, summers meant vacations with family at a remote northern lake in New England. This served as my special look-out where poems emerged, a number of which have been published; many are now central to my poetry book, Living with Time, ready to send out. I love living close to the wild world, looking for new ways to interact with nature. When my husband suddenly died several years ago, my time seemed shattered. But, in searching for a new life, I could, at least, exist full time as a poet. Poetry saved my life. Some of my strongest recent poems may be those letting loose reactions to loss, the dire reaction of feeling halved.
Afterwards, I plunged into intense weekly seminars with the Vermont poet, Rebecca Starks—which has felt like a mini-master’s program. “Otter Creek Poets,” my weekly critique group, gives time to muse and expand ideas, along with “Line Tamers,” another writing group—both have provided inspiration for some twenty years. I’ve been connecting, often via the internet, with poets in my state, out of state, and out of the country. Such is the depth and reach of poetry.
—Libby VanBuskirk
Susanne von Rennenkampff
Horses Coming for the Morning’s Feeding
Brightness seeps in through the blinds,
not the moon that kept me awake last night
but first light. The morning star hangs
big, like a lantern, the only one
still visible in this hour before sunrise.
From my window, I watch the horses
make their way along the fence line
I walked the day before.
The red one first, scruffy coat and sagging back
speaking of age, the privilege
and responsibility of leading, followed by
the beautiful tall black, shiny, in the prime
of his years. Some minutes later,
the pony, head low as if reading
the other ones’ tracks, Hansel
trying to find the crumbs.
I start the kettle, after a while
look out again: there comes one more, a gallant
dappled grey, exquisite. She sets her feet
carefully, stops here and there as if
in contemplation, the sage who would
walk alone.
I think of them, walking to and from
their feeding like this, every day.
The order of their lives.
Where is mine? Who walks ahead of me,
who behind? Who leads, who is looking
for crumbs? Who is the sage?
In a moment the sun will break open
the dark row of trees.
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I grew up in the forested hills and mystical valleys of Hesse in Germany. On long Sunday walks in this lovely landscape with my parents and brothers, my mother often recited poems by the German Romantics – Eichendorff, Mörike, Goethe, Bettina, and Achim von Arnim – which felt totally natural to me even as a child. I browsed through the slim volumes of poetry on my parents' book shelves, understanding the poems with my being before my mind could grasp them fully: they were part of the landscape not only of my surroundings but of life as I knew it.
I married and emigrated to Canada in my early twenties, and for many years poetry took a back seat to raising a family and the demanding work on a grain farm. Still, it was all around me, in the rise and fall of a year's breath, be it in the fields or in my garden. The death of my horse prompted me to write the first poem since my high school years: it felt like the only means I had to deal with my emotions.
By chance I met a group of people with a strong interest in poetry who introduced me to poets like Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry. I started to write more, now in English rather than my mother language, German, supported by the generous help of poet friends, and I studied in workshops with the wonderful poets and teachers Jan Zwicky, Ellen Bass, James Crews, and Danusha Laméris. Mary Oliver remains one of my favourites, joined by many others, from Li Po, Rilke and Hesse to Neruda, Galway Kinnell, Tom Hennen, Lorna Crozier, and Gregory Orr, poets whose words speak to my heart rather than my head and continue to inform my own writing.
—Susanne von Rennenkampff
Ann Weil
Who Shall Name the World?
I have dozens of leafy crotons in my yard, each a riot of color against a dense green backdrop.
The Sloppy Painter with its splatters of sunny yellow, the Freckles Croton, showing off its
ruddy-red speckles. Think Dale Chihuly’s blown glass come to life. Today, my eye is drawn
to the Joseph’s Coat, with its wild bursts of orange, chartreuse, and crimson. If I had named
this croton varietal, I may have called it Fingerpaint after my granddaughter’s artwork that is
always a joyful mess. Or perhaps I’d name it Fourth of July…
fireworks in the garden
sparking and spiraling
yet no one loses an eye
I know from where the Joseph’s Coat croton gets its moniker, though I’m not a believer.
When women name the world, I’ll choose another appellation for this showy shrub. Maybe
Mother’s Apron, after that glorious mayhem of stripes and splotches— a rainbow of puréed
peas, the baby’s formula, pb & j, apple juice, Ovaltine.
൪
I am currently obsessed with Jenny Xie's Eye Level: Poems. Xie is a genius at metaphor! Here are some doozies from her poem entitled "Zuihitsu": "The / warmed-over bones of January," "My attention elastic," "The dark cherries of eyes," "Let there be no more braiding of words," "Leather of daybreak." I confess some of her comparisons are hard for me to make sense of, but oh, the lush playground of language Xie offers! Hers is the only book of poetry I have ever used a highlighter on—just wanting to study and emulate her fresh and vibrant phrasing. Another aspect of Xie’s work I find intriguing is her koan-like style. Her poems present like a series of riddles, each a delicious bon-bon to be tasted only after careful unwrapping. This requires the reader to be fully engaged as an active participant in the poem, which in turn, gives the poem staying power—you’ll be thinking about Xie’s poetry long after its reading. I know I can learn a great deal by reading and emulating Xie’s craft, and for me, acquiring new techniques to make my poetry stronger is what truly excites me. What fun!
—Ann Weil
Linda Mills Woolsey
A Grief, Observed
My breakfast tea grows cold as I watch
a pair of Hooded Mergansers dallying
in the shallows, their forms blurred
by thickly falling snow. The dapper male
is a patchwork of bold color blocks—
black, white, cinnamon. I think of how
you would have loved to catch them
with your telephoto lens. I want to walk
down to the water, kneel, draw them
close. But I know they’d flee at the rasp
of the opening door.
The morning you died, bleeding, drowned
by choice, face down in another creek—
it was midsummer, mists lifting, as I sat
here, sipping tea, watching a muskrat
feed on something in the knee-deep water
by the rock bar where you loved to fish.
He was like a critter from a kid’s book—
water-matted fur, wide eyes—I smiled
as his whiskery muzzle disappeared, as
he tugged, rump up, again and again,
before the phone rang.
The mergansers linger, resisting a current
they’ve been riding gleefully all morning.
Circling, they bob side by side, inseparable.
Through my binoculars they look close enough
to touch. Why do I always find myself loving
the world at a distance, learning each loss
over the phone, as if I were a stranger?
Today the memory of you is so close, I want
to kneel in snow, be blurred by it, know
I’m touching you still.
൪
As a child, I found reading a means of emotional survival in a world where I was the odd child out—at once “backward” and “high strung.” Hearing impaired since birth, I’ve always lived on the ragged edge of silence, straining to hear the music of ordinary conversation.
Poetry embodied that music, making it fully accessible, even as it slowed my racing mind and taught me to pay attention to the world around me and within. Metaphor pointed to the interconnectedness of all things—galaxies, ecosystems, human lives—even as it held the inherent tension of the world’s divisions, estrangements, gaps, and losses.
So I write to reconnect—with myself, others, the world. And I read to see how it’s done. Among the many poets who have nurtured me, I find myself returning to George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Jane Kenyon, Amy Clampitt, W.S. Merwin, and Louis Glück.
Age, of course, brings both a deepening and loss of connections. When I was in my sixties a younger cousin went off his meds and committed suicide. Suddenly my love for him had nowhere to go. Draft after draft of elegies for Jeff landed in the bin.
While I usually find myself paralyzed by poetry prompts, I found the key to “A Grief, Observed” in David Hassler’s online workshop “The Alchemy of Poetry: Transforming Grief into Gift,” sponsored by the Washington National Cathedral Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage. In the poem, a creekside place Jeff and I both loved becomes a ground for exploring the baffled desire for connection I think we all experience in a world in which we are always strangers and yet strangely at home.
—Linda Mills Woolsey
Editor's Choice
All Editor's Choice poems from Winter Issue 2024 through Spring/Summer Issue 2025 will automatically be entered in our single-poem contest. Winner to be announced in Fall Issue 2025.
***
• For a woman traveling alone, whether it is to a different landscape, or through history, or our own pasts, grounding in the present is essential. Molly Fisk recognizes that in this poem.
—Linda Blaskey
Molly Fisk
Because I Will Be Leaving Soon
driving east on the loneliest road
in America by myself,
over its 17 mountain passes
between four and nine thousand
feet higher than every sea, heading
toward the longtime home
of the native Anasazi who came
before the Pueblo, to the last Mormon
hamlet where mail arrived by mule-train,
a record held through 1933, one year
past my mother's birth, I'm paying
close attention to wisteria blooming
pink outside my bathroom window,
at certain times of afternoon its color
somehow reflected on the shallow
porcelain sink. My mother would want
to paint its dripping racemes, the fat
black and gold bees entering, drinking.
The thought of leaving alerts me,
tunes my senses to precisely
where I stand, as if not to lose myself,
as if to remember who I am.
൪
I go back in my mind to many poems, usually ones I've memorized, and sometimes one line but sometimes the whole thing. The last stanza of Robert Frost's “Reluctance,” is one. My college boyfriend suggested I learn it by heart, and that was long before I became a poet. Ah, when to the heart of man / Was it ever less than a treason / To go with the drift of things, / To yield with a grace to reason, / And bow and accept the end / Of a love or a season?
Marie Howe's “Part of Eve's Discussion,” whose first line is so nicely complicated: It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand /...
The opening of Sharon Olds' “The Promise”: With the second drink, at the restaurant, / holding hands on the bare table, / we are at it again, renewing our promise / to kill each other...
Mary Oliver's “Wild Geese,” which led me to poetry in the first place, even though it's become so over-exposed now. You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
Looking at these examples I'm seeing sentimentality and music in the Frost; an effort at specificity about something hard to define in Howe; the hallmark direct, matter-of-fact shock from Olds; and in Oliver's line a clear authority. Those traits are present in my work, alone or in combinations, a lot of the time, and this is where I learned them. Or maybe because I wanted and still want to write this way, I was drawn to them.
—Molly Fisk
• In "JOURNEY MERCIES," what’s not to love about a metaphor that celebrates the good with the bad bumps in the road?
—Jane C. Miller
Essie Sappenfield
JOURNEY MERCIES
I’ve got miles on me you can tell by looking,
And Celeste, her odometer reads
one hundred ninety-five thousand
three hundred and two.
Two faithful hags heading home to the barn.
This road, this lonely stretch of K-15
wears hard on us,
black skunks shocked
with white rolled up like plush toys,
and on the shoulder grit
a smear with a possum’s naked tail.
Last month Celeste caught a deer—
a fawn no bigger than a dog—
still wears a clutch of hair
on her right front bumper.
But today wild roses clamor
up a barbed wire fence, a red-wing
blackbird sings from a cattail
in the bar ditch,
and just this side of Mulvane
a line of cars bumps
out around a box turtle
creeping toward Udall.
൪
Tillie Olsen said, “It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.” It has taken me years to consent to that baptism. Writers who have helped me along the way have been Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Richard Wilbur, Linda Pastan, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and Naomi Shihab Nye.
When I understood that my penchant for expecting the worst had blinded me to my capacity for joy, I found poets to show the way. Barbara Hamby’s “Thus Spake the Mockingbird” was a revelation. Jack Gilbert’s “A Brief for the Defense” became a survival manifesto, and Ross Gay taught me that actively seeking delight was a worthy occupation. I read Charlotte’s Web and The Wind in the Willows every year or so.
I grew up on the cadences of the King James Bible and around grown-ups who could still recite poems they learned in school. When I first started writing, I had the illusion that if I could just find the right words, people would take me seriously and do what needed to be done. It didn’t work, but it gave me the satisfaction of figuring out what I thought.
I lived my first 60 years in Texas where people talked in colorful idioms, moved to Kansas where this poem is set, and now live in Nashville. As an octogenarian who lives alone, I see how unlovely and lonely life can be. Fortunately, I have a family consenting to their own baptisms, and I live in a community of cohousers and friends I’ve gathered over the years. I need other people, but I also need that space in the morning when I can be alone with that Presence who blesses me and helps me find the words to express it.
—Essie Sappenfield
• I love this poem, how it reels us in with quiet, perfect detail, how the beginning foreshadows the dark end, all of it capturing that dangerous, fraught period when girls of a certain age can go completely unseen unless they are seen for the wrong things. The first two lines alone speak volumes.
—Heather L. Davis
Melody Wilson
Verge
--Jackson, Mississippi 1975
The flour had weevils
though I noticed too late.
I spent most of my days
watching summer shrink
beyond bent Venetian blinds.
At night I perched on the curb
out front of my sister’s duplex
strobing my long blonde hair
shoulder to shoulder like a lure,
legs cast into the street
toward Battlefield Park.
I never considered
what would happen
if I ever got it right,
if a truck didn’t just slow,
but stopped.
Playground swings dangled
across the way,
their chains shivering light,
but something had tipped
and I didn’t care anymore.
Soon I’d be back in California
in the amber glare
of my mother’s eyes.
I must have said yes
when my sister asked
if I could bake,
showed me the cookbook
and left for work.
I noticed motion in the flour
cleaning up, frosted the cake
anyway. I was afraid
someone might notice, but no one did.
No one noticed anything at all.
൪
I never really went to high school though I was raised in a house where a few novels leaned against each other on shelves—Michener, Hemingway, mid-century fare, as well as several Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. But despite having memorized much of The Real Mother Goose as a child, I first really encountered poetry in community college, in my edition of the textbook so many of us used, Sound and Sense. Three poems I clearly remember being in it were Robert Frost’s “Bereft,” T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and Adrienne Rich’s “Living in Sin.” I loved the language, of “Prufrock,” though I remember specifically loving the differing sections and pace. And I shared the raw emotion of “Bereft,” having just lost my own father. But there was something about the “sepulchral bottles,” the “beetle eyes,” and the “relentless milkman” coming “up the stairs” of “Living in Sin” that spoke about life in a way the others did not. I realized there was room for my experience on the page.
I probably started writing “Verge” before I found poetry, and while I’ve tried to write it several times since, this is as close as I’ve come. It’s one of several poems that grapple with the summer I should have been preparing for high school. This year, a lifetime and much education later, I found myself writing the critical essay for my MFA program. In a period of about three weeks I read (much of it for the second or third time) all of Sharon Olds’ collected poetry. This process took me through her entire life in her inimitable voice, which of course, inspired me to try to revisit this pivotal period of my own life.
While I’m sure “Verge” isn’t the last word on this period of my life, I did benefit from both the careful reading of my writing partner, Annette Sisson, and the specific advice of my semester advisor, Ellen Bass, on this poem. I know I haven’t opened it as much as Ellen wanted me to. Maybe next time.
—Melody Wilson
What We're Reading
We like that our contributors share what they are reading in their artist statements,so we are returning the favor. Here is a list of what we are reading.
***
Heather L. Davis
Mother of Other Kingdoms - Kai Coggin
So What. - Frederick Seidel
The Moon That Turns You Back - Hola Alyan
Linda Blaskey
Assisted Living - Erin Murphy
Singular Bodies - Ruth L. Schwartz
The Night the Rain Had Nowhere to G0 - William Woolfitt
Jane C. Miller
Lately -Laure-Anne Bosselaar
The Golden Hour -Sue Ellen Thompson
postmortem say - Amanda Newell
Contributor Kudos
Contributors, post your current accomplishments on our private Facebook page and we’ll give you a shout out in the next issue of the journal.
***
Zeeva Bukai's novel The Anatomy of Exile will be released in January, 2025 by Delphinium Books. It is available for preorder from Amazon (amazon.com).
Heather L. Davis' poem "The Pale Pink Ceramic Cup for Instance" was a finalist for Best of the Net, nominated by Quartet. https://www.quartetjournal.com/summer-issue-2022
Joanne Durham’s chapbook, On Shifting Shoals, was reviewed in Sundress Reads, July 2, 2024. (sundressblog.com)
Tara O'Brien Elliott's poem "Grief" appeared in Cumberland River Review, Issue 13.3 (crr.trevecca.edu).
Meredith Davies Hadaway's poem "Like Stonehenge" appeared in Cumberland River Review, issue 13.3 (crr.trevecca.edu); her poem "Zenith" appeared in Rust & Moth, Autumn 2024 (rustandmoth.com).
Karen Paul Holmes's poem "I Text My Friend with Cancer 'How Are You Doing' " appeared in One Art: a journal of poetry, August 12, 2024 (oneartpoetry.com).
Hilary Rogers King's poetry collection, Stitched on Me, will be released Fall, 2024 by Riot in Your Throat press. It is available for preorder from riotinyourthroat.com.
Linda Laderman's poem "Dear Ms Blakely" appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Action, Spectacle (action-spectacle.com); her poem "Bandstand" appeared in One Art: a journal of poetry, August 17, 2024 (oneartpoetry.com).
Erin C. Murphy was featured on Rattlecast 251, June 30, 2024 (YouTube.com); her book Fluent in Blue was released in April, 2024 by Grayson Books (graysonbooks.com).
Shaun R. Pankoski’s poem “Immortal One” appeared in One Art: a journal of poetry, July 6, 2024 (oneartpoetry.com); her chapbook, Tipping the Maids in Chocolate: Observations of Japan, was a finalist in the Lefty Blondie Press 2024 First Chapbook Award; her poem "Late Summer" appeared in Verse-Virtual, August, 2024
(verse-virtual.org).
Annette Marie Sisson's poem "Statistics" appeared in Cumberland River Review, Issue 13.3 (crr.trevecca.edu); her poem "The Earth Will Curve You to its Orbit" appeared in Summer 2024, Issue Nine, of Susurrus (susurrusthemagazine.com); she will read September 5th at Broadway Books in Portland, OR for the launch of her new book Winter Sharp with Apples (terrapinbooks.com)
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Congratulations to ൪uartet's
Best of the Net Nominees
D. Dina Friedman: "Nebraska" (Winter 2024)
Wendell Hawken: "I Live Near the Village of Hawken, County of Wendell" (Spring/Summer 2024)
Hilary King: "Knowledge Duplex" (Fall 2023)
Eve F. W. Linn: "Stieglitz Recalls an Argument, New York City, Summer 1918" (Fall 2023)
VA Smith: "When Hayden Carruth Visited My High School Creative Writing Class" (Spring/Summer 2024)
Lisa Zerkle: "Denise" (Fall 2023)