Deidra Greenleaf Allan

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Spike and Shoot
           For my daughter, Alexis

 

The silver squill cactus 
someone gave me in condolence 

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has sprouted a slender stalk 
that rises delicately from its velvet corona of leaves

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bearing a tiny carillon of bell-shaped flowers. 
It’s the dead

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of winter and this miniature declaration
of life’s persistence catches me up

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steeped as I am in the bitter brew
of grieving

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reminding me that life is both spike and shoot—
despair, then hope, then despair again—

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our fate pulled like iron filings between 
these opposing poles. 

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Were I so inclined, I’d stop this bloom
let it shrivel and die, poisoned 

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in the same acidic soil in which my heart 
is planted. 

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Instead I watch it grow, then bloom.
Not to sharpen my pain, but as a way forward, 

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like a child’s laughter through the open window 
of a house in mourning.

 

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My greatest poetic influences are Emily Dickinson (for the large ideas she embraces), Lucille Clifton (for her economy of words), and T.S. Eliot (for his imagery). There are of course many other poets whom I have been inspired by and respect, including Jack Gilbert, Jane Hirshfield, Galway Kinnell, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Stanley Kunitz, Ruth Stone, Basho, Li Po, and other early Japanese and Chinese poets, among so many others. 

 

My work, or project as some call it, is to investigate a moment in time and uncover the underlying truth that connects it to everything else. I am not good at leaping or incorporating surprising shifts in my poems, but like a laser, I zero in on the moment and its manifestation of the eternal. 

 

The subject of “Spike and Shoot” is focused on a theme I keep coming back to—the great interplay of hope and despair, grief and joy. I believe these apparently opposite states, symbolizing the yin and yang of life, are just aspects of the same thing revealing itself over time and through circumstance. Like the speaker in the poem, we may try to stay in the state of yin or the state of yang, but life refuses stasis.  

 

—Deidra Greenleaf Allan

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Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

 

 

Advice to Year-Ago Me

 

Next time, 

don’t speak

solely with hand gestures. 

Slow your speed-walk, 

put your earbuds in your pocket, 

and help 

the one-street-over neighbor 

that you hadn’t yet met, 

find her runaway 

chihuahua. 

Learn her name. 

Learn her puppy’s name. 

Commit them to memory,

in anticipation of future 

rescue missions 

and happenstance chats. 

Invite her over 

for strawberry lemonade 

on your back porch— 

without the worry 

over weeds run amok.

Listen to her talk 

about her children

who have fled 

to their faraway nests. 

Discover 

how the dog

sleeps beside her 

in a bed the size of a continent, 

how widowhood came too early, 

how she needs someone 

to talk to. 

Become her friend.

 

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Poetry is my safe place, my harbor. I can share my stories and my secrets, both straightforwardly and cryptically, as I commingle my experiences with observation and imagination. I can play with the puzzle of language. I can dance on the page when my body can no longer keep up with the beat. And I can sit in Poetry’s audience, reveling in the spellbinding lyric and captivating narrative of the vastness of talented poets writing today. When I read a poem, I almost always learn something new about people, about culture, about science, about place, about a million things I never even knew existed. When I write a poem, I hope to learn something new too, sometimes through my own curiosity & research, but more often about the parts of myself that are hidden so deep, I don’t even realize they’re there. If I can write a poem that does that for someone else, then, perhaps, I’ll have earned the right to humbly call myself a poet too. 

 

—Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

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Subhaga Crystal Bacon

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If I give my heart, will you promise not to break it?

                                                            Lucinda Williams

 

 

The intuitive sat before her San Diego windows

green leafy bush behind her head, and one curled

vine waving in the blast of sunlight. She sensed

my young self, the age of my wounding, 

with its deep sadness and righteous rage. 

 

            The child wants to be called Subhaga, not Crystal, 

             name given to her because someone else had given it

             to their daughter, the most beautiful thing she could think of.

             A hand-me-down story and name, nothing to do with her.

             Child without words, who came into life to be loved

              by women, to be in sisterhood, a lifelong seeking.

 

Inside me, my child-self asks to be loved

at nearly seventy, down to the final years.

She’s ready to blossom out of the rift they left.

 

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This poem came out of some work I’m doing to heal from a recently recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse. There are times when a door opens, and a poem emerges from the perfect storm of deep feeling, vulnerability, and attention. This was one of those times. A poet whose work I admire and come back to over and over is Diane Seuss, the queen of the sonnet in my book. She posted a series of prompts for the Academy in July, and each one featured what she calls the secret sauce, fourteen lines. The sonnet tends to be my go-to form. I love the way it both opens itself to revelation and requires concision. I’m drawn to poetry of the personal, the way our lives are constantly being shaped by our pasts. Bringing the past into consciousness gives me access to the ways it’s marked me, made me who I am. Some books that have modeled this for me are frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss, Liar by Jessica Cuello, If Some God Shakes Your House by Jennifer Franklin, and chigger ridge by Nicole Hefner Callihan. Seuss asks in “Weeds” in Modern Poetry, “What can memory be in these terrible times? / Only instruction. Not a dwelling.” For me, memory is always instructive. And then there’s Lucinda Williams, still writing and singing her ballads into her seventies. The line from her song “I Lost It” came to me as a title for this poem, and I trusted its fit. The poem is about knowing and being known, loving and being loved, primarily by ourselves. Her question’s a kind of koan because if there’s anything life teaches us, if we’re living vulnerably, it’s that our hearts will be broken over and over. Still, we give them.

 

—Subhaga Crystal Bacon

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Marion Starling Boyer

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Apple, Penny, Chair

 

Wind shuffles autumn leaves as we drive home sharing 

a quiet that rests easy as a spoon in an empty bowl. 

We both glance left where horses graze in a fenced pasture 

and you say, I missed the three words. I nod, then ask 

if you remember your dad splitting open a persimmon seed 

to discover the silhouette of a tiny knife inside, the shape 

that foretells bitter cold. He liked to show this city girl 

things like that. Is that true? I asked. Your dad smiled 

and said, Seems to work that way. When we come 

to the section of the road you love for its curves, 

you take the wheel in both hands. I know you’re missing 

the souped-up Miata we sold last year, how you raced it, 

took each turn at its most efficient diagonal, accelerating out. 

She gave me three words. I got one, I think.  We zip along 

and I catch a glimpse of a red-tail on the telephone wire. 

Just a brown bulk watching from high above the road.

 

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I was in my middle years when, by luck, I signed up for a writing class for adults taught by Diane Seuss and another about reading books by contemporary poets, led by Conrad Hilberry and then attended an intensive, week-long course with Pattiann Rogers. These wonderful poets inspired and enriched my writing life and skills profoundly. I’ve also worked with a trusted circle of poets to share thoughts on our drafts, a circle that has spanned more than two decades and two states.  

 

I find myself admiring poets whose style is very different from my own: Di’s arresting alchemy as she fashions personal heartache into formidable poems; Ilya Kaminsky’s ability to press a political agenda in the guise of folk tale; Natalie Diaz’s stunning fury and sadness transformed by form and lyricism; the exquisite musicality and imaginations of Pattiann Rogers and Brigit Pegeen Kelly.  

 

Much of my previous poetry and collections have been written as persona poems. “Apple, Penny, Chair,” and other poems I’m currently writing, mark a change as now the work is more personal as I write about watching my husband of 52 years fall ever further into Alzheimer’s disease. 

 

Crafting “Apple, Penny, Chair” and other such moments into poetry helps because in attending to the compression, music and demands of writing lyrically requires emotional distance.  It is also satisfying to attempt to capture the complicated feelings that are coming to the fore. I cannot help but return often to Stanley Kunitz’s book Passing Through, and am always deeply moved by his poem “Touch Me,” in which Kunitz writes: Darling, do you remember / the man you married? Touch me, / remind me who I am.

 

—Marion Starling Boyer

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Sarah Carleton

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The Secret Life of Sunflowers

 

Finger Lakes sunflowers rise from ditches

and medians, filling gaps with the closest thing 

 

to sunshine gardeners can find

and flooding people’s peripheral vision during July

 

and August so all through the cloudy months

minds are bright with the afterimage.

 

I drove past a wedge of the flowers this morning 

and now their ragdoll heads nod hello 

 

whenever I close my eyes, plus the web 

keeps showing me a photo of them in a Chernobyl

 

field, an array of yellow crowding out doomsday,

power plant cylinders receding behind the jostling

 

citizens, who in their role as hyperaccumulators

have a hidden pastime belowground

 

pulling toxic metals from the dirt as they regard

the horizon, wide sunbonnets tilted sideways. 

 

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I write poetry to carve out space for insight and amazement. My poems are distillations that let me observe and make sense of what’s in and around me. As a child, I loved Robert Frost. When I was a teenager, I read some poems by Richard Hugo and felt a tectonic shift. My poet brain was never the same after that. Now there are so many poets who inspire me that I can’t list them all. I started a book group just for poetry a few years ago and have discovered that poems get better when you read them out loud and discuss them with friends. My current bedside-table book pile includes Elizabeth Bishop, Diane Seuss, Wisława Szymborska, and Jenna Le. There's a long waiting list for this pile.

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I’ve always thought of myself as a poet, but I took a long break from writing during my late twenties and thirties. My creative energy during that time was focused on playing old-time banjo and sewing fabric hats, which I sold at craft shows. Many of these were made from scraps of different colors, patterns, and fibers. In writing, I love music and metaphor. I’m a big fan of concrete imagery and natural voice. My work with textiles has had an influence—I often visualize poems as crazy quilts, each word a texture or color that must be placed in just the right relationship to others so as to create the most resonant effect. The themes I play with include contemporary life, environment, travel, art, fairy tales, relationships, family, music, and memory. First thing in the morning, when the house is dark and quiet, is my favorite time to write, but once I’ve started a poem, I tend to poke at it the rest of the day.

 

—Sarah Carleton

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Jane Mary Curran

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Snow Moon of January

 

the great white moon

shines on old snow 

etching shadows

 

a lean fox hunts

a thin bear sleeps

 

an old man

runs crooked fingers 

through a bag of seeds 

 

a purple crocus, 

petaled chalice, 

parts the snow

 

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I grew up on a farm in Indiana where winter temperatures rarely got above freezing and snow kept us in days at a time. On clear afternoons the sun, a red disc, set in a sky, crackling with cold. Into these January days and nights, usually late in the month, would come the tiniest bit of color. Mother and I waited for that purple sign that the earth was turning into a new spring light.

 

I live in Asheville, North Carolina and we are living with the disaster of Hurricane Helene, an event beyond our imaginations. As I sat in the dark in the weeks before power came back on, I needed somber poems to match our new reality. I read the poems of Thomas Hardy, R. S. Thomas and Rilke’s Book of Hours. I also reread Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series and P.D. James’ Dalgleish novels. The acceptance of “Snow Moon…” and the memories that rose from the lines were sweet moments in the beginning of aftermath. 

 

—Jane Mary Curran

 

Cortney Davis

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Reading Raymond Carver after My Divorce

 

Here are these magnificent poems,

            but I'm taken with his back cover photo:

                        the piercing, easy-to-look-into eyes,

 

broad nose, neat, tight-back ears, 

            the whorled delicate edge. 

                         And the hair, the unruly hair

 

on the slightly too-big head 

            that might rest heavy against my breast. 

                        They looked alike―Carver, the poet, 

 

my husband, a carpenter. And a house 

            built plank by plank is not unlike a poem―  

                        straight bearing wall or lightning word, 

                        

arms strong enough to lift a beam or hold a woman. 

            I can only guess what makes any man 

                        build a house, write a poem, or leave―

 

something in the fit of hip and valley, 

                        the click of the right phrase. Even the uneasy 

                                    comfort of the not yet written page.

 

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Over a long nursing career during which I witnessed the realities of birth, suffering, healing and death, I learned how deeply our body's stories, memories and images inform our lives. Nursing has little to do with this poem, but at some point nursing and poetry merged, and poetry became the perfect place both to care and to keep, where the mysteries of the heart could be revealed through the sensuality of physical detail. It was the photo of Carver that jolted me, carried me back to a long-ago marriage and to the image of my then-husband. I love how a few lines of poetry can hold so much―all the remembered sounds, scents, touches and losses. There is something comforting as well in all that is yet to come, all the possibilities. I most often turn to poets whose writing honors and explores the relationship of the physical and the emotional: Henri Cole, Anya Silver, Dorianne Laux, Sharon Olds. 

 

—Cortney Davis

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Patricia Davis-Muffett

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Advice from the meadow

 

On the days when you seem to be desolate

dusty earth, inhospitable, don’t give up.

 

Even when the rains come and you feel yourself

sliding, becoming even worse than you were,

 

be patient. Remember: there was a time

late last spring when you burst 

 

with the spiky heads of bee balm, the velvet bulbs

and golden petals of black-eyed susans,

 

the frayed edges of grasses, the profusion

of forget-me-nots. If you close your eyes,

 

breathe deeply, you can feel the prickle

of roots just starting to stretch within you.

 

Never mind your worry that you don’t

have it in you anymore. Ignore the mocking call

 

of blue jays from the evergreen stand that knows

no fallowness. Instead, recall that last year

was more profuse than the year before–

 

that every year ahead of you could be a new start,

a surprise alighting of goldfinches and song sparrows,

a home for families of rabbits, an arising fresh 

of something that has waited until now to emerge.

 

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Decades ago, when I was in college, I wanted to be a poet. I set myself on that path and went on to get my MFA shortly after undergrad, but it turned out I had more living to do before I could become the poet I wanted to be. While raising three children and pursuing a career in tech marketing, I let my writing fall away and only came back to it in 2020 when I realized that I wasn’t writing because I was afraid I had forgotten how to do it. This poem is one of a series about the meadow my husband and I have been working on in an attempt to return part of our yard to a more natural habitat. Those poems are an important part of my new full length manuscript.

 

There are so many poets I admire. Some of my oldest loves are Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, Pablo Neruda, Adrienne Rich, and Sharon Olds. I also return over and over to the poems of Aimee Nezukumatathil and Ada Limón, and some of my favorite books of poetry in recent years are written by Diane Seuss, Jessica L. Walsh, Sarah Ann Winn, Kai Coggin, Donna Spruijt-Metz, and Joan Kwon Glass.

 

—Patricia Davis-Muffett

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Mary Fister

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THEORY OF RATIONAL EXPECTATIONS

 

No room for miracles here,

just cross-offs on the calendar

that drained days of luster

as we waited for another try.

 

A natural task—to join

our life-stuff, save

your line from extinction,

denied as often as it rained.

 

We began to view

my uterus as capable

of embrace, not a misshapen pear

shedding windfall.

 

We loaded the syringe

with hormones enough

to infuse my body

with hope—tried again.

 

We roused the logy egg

that it might burst, 

complete the rough sketch

of life this time.

 

My body unresponsive,

dulled by ill-timing,

twisted cysts, hope rebuffed,

our hearts stung.

 

Yet we turned, stripped, 

let our bodies nurse 

that blight, our grief. 

Sorrow, then must steep

 

until it comes of age.

So there was no accounting

for days of waiting,

then a quickening, a life.

 

Cross-offs replaced

by a certain settling in.

Nothing rational about her coming—

we were down on the count,

waiting for science’s final assist,

so we could say we went 

as far as we could,

 

then go on with that cheap

consolation. So it is worthy work—

two years to the day

when we first saw her

 

heart lighting up the ultrasound.

I now paste it

in the back of her album.

Those pings,

 

those chambers

on the screen.

Fierce was her heart,

wild, new, unspooling.

 

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An exercise in my very first poetry workshop at the University of New Hampshire with Carol Muske-Dukes was to write a poem about a privileged moment that she said launched Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I had returned to UNH for a second degree in English after migrating to the Pacific Northwest for a year, where I discovered Theodore Roethke; in particular the “North American Sequence,” and “What Can I Tell My Bones.” Roethke’s unabashed and visceral descriptions of the journeys of the self and soul shook me to the core and remade me. So, when we were given that assignment of writing about a privileged moment, I had a little Roethke safely harbored. I ended up writing a very short poem titled “Elegy for Essie.” I was working at a horse farm, and Essie was dying of cancer. A foal had been born and was having trouble nursing and getting the colostrum, first milk, that is critical for the immune system. The workers couldn’t get the foal to connect. Essie, so frail, came out in her nightgown, and showed them her time-tested method, and sure enough, the foal started sucking! This exercise continues to shape how I approach each new poem, as I find that whatever I observe in the natural world, or the emotional and spiritual field that life beckons me into, becomes a privilege, even in those moments of deep loss and grief. Carol Muske-Dukes introduced me to Seamus Heaney and Elizabeth Bishop, poets who have remained constants. Charles Wright was another transformative discovery. I adore how a landscape is often the launching point for a philosophical meditation in his work. Of the many that have moved me, “Body and Soul,” and “Body and Soul II” are steadfast ones. 

 

—Mary Fister

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Catherine Gewertz

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Master of the Current

 

By the time you died, you weighed practically nothing.

You passed quiet as the breath of silk on silk, 

my unsaid apology draped heavy over the mirror.

 

Of all the things I saved of yours, the one I hold most often 

is a photo of you by a rushing river in Yosemite, 

single and sun-drenched, long before anything went wrong.

You’re in boy-shorts and a striped bandeau, smiling at the camera.

 

On this day you were just you, before him, and before us, 

a strong swimmer, certain of your strength in the currents.

 

But we roiled the waters; undertowed you

with tempers, swirled you in strange silences.

 

When you looked to me for rescue, I failed you. 

I was a child, or, as you’d say later, 

too deficient in love to save you.

 

You marked me defective. 

I branded you danger.

 

Years I daughtered dutifully,

but not in the thick, filling ways you craved.

 

What is the opposite of forgiveness?

 

At the end, I brought you chocolate milkshakes, 

sat on your bed, told you jokes. 

 

Your dying opened a space for me to yearn in,

for the mother I never knew,

standing on that rock, master of the current,

a strand of dark hair lifted,

weightless, on the breeze.

 

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Thinking quietly, with my arms folded, traps me in dead ends. It’s only through writing (or talking with a friend) that I can make any sense of my inner life or the world around me. 

 

I force the hardest pieces of myself through the distillation process to become poems because I need to get somewhere: I need to reach that place where I read my poem and recognize myself, and I say, “Yes. That was it. That was how it was for me.” And that place needs to be better than the experience that prompted the poem; with beauty, tenderness, anger or forgiveness that lets me release it.

 

I wrote this poem to try to make sense of the complex relationship I had with my mother. I find I often seek out writers who transform the hardest stuff into art with great bravery: Diane Seuss, Dorianne Laux, Marie Howe, Sharon Olds.

 

A few lines that bowl me over: 

 

Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me. I didn’t want it. (Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets)

 

If I loved you, being this close would kill me. (Dorianne Laux, “This Close”)

 

Praise him. / I know he can hardly bear to touch me. (Marie Howe, “The Attic”)

 

—Catherine Gewertz

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Becky Gould Gibson

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Saint Catherine’s Finger

                                    

                                     Basilica of San Domenico

                                               Catherine of Siena

                                               (1347-1382)

 

 

Would you want us to stand here gawking

at your finger in its case

of glass and silver,

pointing the Way to Heaven?

You refused pane—we’re told, 

small meats and cheeses,

to come closer to Jesus, suffer with Him.

How is it the finger’s intact

after all these centuries—

though brownish and wrinkled

as a monk in his habit,

your manicured nail his pale luminous face? 

Caterina. Caterina da Siena.

 

 

Relic, synecdoche. Mere part of a woman

who used this finger to touch, 

curl, bend, press lips in a whisper

to shush up a little brother—

hers or someone else’s—

beckon come closer, 

soothe a fevered forehead, 

show to a schoolmate

the yellow cat in the gutter—

sprawling, indolent—

scrawl her name on fogged glass

in large deliberate letters:

Caterina. Caterina Benincasa.

 

 

You’d recognize your city—October’s gold

among Tuscan hills,

stone streets, stone houses.

Walk with me.

This is the month—remember—

for harvesting chestnuts.

Here, on this corner,

a man’s selling them               

from his metal roasting cart. Five euros.

He hands us a small paper sack—

hot and fragrant.

You’ll recall the taste—

Caterina—even, perhaps, the pleasure of tasting.

 

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I read poetry to see what other poets are doing and what I can learn from them. Occasionally, I’ll read a poem, a passage, or a line that will inspire a poem of my own. Recently, I have plundered R.M. Rilke’s Duino Elegies, W.S. Merwin’s The Shadow of Sirius, and William Stafford’s A Glass Face in the Rain. Stafford, in particular, I find a warm and congenial companion early in the morning as I try to gather the courage to put down lines of my own. 

 

But I also like to revisit the older poets. Now I’m immersed in Homer’s Iliad, newly translated from the Greek by Emily Wilson. Wilson’s Iliad is masterful. Her sure-footed blank verse, with its natural diction and swift pace, makes it seem as if the Trojan War were happening right before us. At the same time, I’m reading Water Words, the latest book of poems by a Greek-American friend, N.C. Germanacos. His wise poems crown a long and reflective life. He sees his experience in America through the refracting lens of the deep cultural history of his native land. 

 

A poem may begin anywhere. Something gives me a small shock, and that’s my signal to move in. I started writing “Saint Catherine’s Finger” in Tuscany during a trip there two years ago. Entering the basilica dedicated to the saint and seeing the relic of her finger in its glass case—so upright, so seemingly alive—stopped me in my tracks. Catherine the woman, not simply Catherine the saint, rose before me, and I knew I had a poem.

 

—Becky Gould Gibson

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Catherine Abbey Hodges

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WILD GLADNESS

 

I keep thinking about a man I ran into at a party last month,

someone I’d known only a little a couple of decades ago, more

my husband’s friend than mine. We hadn’t stayed in touch

but I’d heard the unsurprising contours through mutual

friends—he’d married, had a couple of kids. It was loud,

people enjoying themselves, voices and corks and clinks

of glasses, band in the corner doing covers from the 90s.

The two of us were crossing the room from opposite

directions and recognized each other at the same time, 

hi, good to see you, how’ve you been, and then he was telling 

me his marriage was ending and there with the volume rising 

around us he began weeping and then so was I as the party 

jostled on and I moved closer to catch what he was saying,

and though I caught only every fourth word or so, the weeping 

was the thing, that and the failed attempts to pull it together, 

the two of us a site of devastation, tiny island nation hit

by a hurricane and threatened by rising seas, me both appalled

and unapologetic, then and still, that such a thing could at once

wreck me and wrack me with this wild gladness: I am alive 

and here to hear and feel even as I dissolve, even as I wash away.

 

൪

 

Louise Glück wrote, in the final two lines of “Nostos,” “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.” I feel the truth of this running through my life, and I also chafe against it: I want to view and experience the world in the freshest possible way every day, and I want to write from that place. 

 

No surprise, then, that I gravitate toward and return to writers whose work evidences the freshness and clarity of vision I aim for. This list includes Annie Dillard, especially Holy the Firm; Stanley Kunitz, who wrote, “I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world”; and Marie Howe, Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Peter Everwine—among so many others. For voice and a contemporary, relaxed metaphysics, I love Carrie Fountain, Tony Hoagland, Ross Gay.

 

Lately, when I get stuck, I’ve been doing 10-minute collages of found words and images on 4x6 cards. I’m talking literal cut and paste. It’s an invigorating, playful way to practice seeing things anew, and the time constraint keeps my perfectionism at bay.

 

Long ago, I read The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation by Pattiann Rogers. That subtitle says it all: as I make my poems, they make me.

 

—Catherine Abbey Hodges

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Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka

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The Girl of the Disappeared House

 

There was a house on the corner of our street

where the author of Cerulean Girl lived

behind a tall fence and a thuja hedge. 

 

I remember pale colors, fuzzy figures. 

The cerulean girl lifts herself from the page, travels 

in the light of the moon. As Mom reads, I see the girl float 

through the house, the gardens inside that fence.

She meets animals and people, not sure what they are. 

She is searching for something or someone. 

It takes a few pages. In the end she returns 

through the window with the blue curtains billowing 

in the breeze, and softly falls back where she started. 

 

There was a house.

 

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I grew up in the company of great 19th century Polish Romantic poets. In my home in Warsaw, we cited lines from Ballads and Romances by Adam Mickiewicz whenever an occasion called. Poetry, like jokes about the government, helped us cope with the Communist reality. 

 

Among my first books, next to the nursery rhymes by Jan Brzechwa and Julian Tuwim, was Niebieska dziewczynka (The Cerulean Girl) by Janina Porazińska. There are many reasons for going back to that girl in my poem. In my imagination, the author resides in a house with a garden, a short walk from the new apartment building where I lived with my parents and sister. There is a B&W photo: my little sister in the carriage, me, a bow in my hair, and my mother, a poet herself. That line, “and softly falls back where she started,” is crucial and yet seems written by my subconscious, a wishful longing of the

involuntary emigrant, cut off from her loved ones by the introduction of martial law while on a postdoctoral fellowship in the United States.

 

The power of the imagination helps me go on. Like when I face my four-year old granddaughter living in a far-away house with a small garden in Canada “reading” her books to me over Skype, our way of being together. I suffer from a chronic disease and am isolated from all and everything by a curtain seemingly even more impenetrable than the Iron Curtain was. As opposed to the cerulean girl, in another poem of mine, my granddaughter looks at me and grins, “I know what you are.” / The girl knows.” That poem, as well as “The Girl of the Disappeared House,” are from my poetry memoir, titled The Book She Remembers, out there looking for a home. 

 

—Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka

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Cecille Marcato

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Sonata in the Key of Hat

 

He is not a geologist but a photographer

by which I mean in place of a rock hammer for scale 

in this picture he has doffed a Panama hat, 

cocked it jauntily atop a basalt boulder, measurably old. 

We the viewers are near the hat & see it shrink a road 

through the desert down to a piece of string, turn 

the uplift towering above it into a modest building.

 

But you asked about the light in the canyon:  it is a tone poem; 

no, it is a sonata -- largo movements bounded by the quick 

& energetic, the bold & climactic, changing keys, seeming

to come from all the instruments in their turn.

Here, though, in this picture light emanates from the hat

lit like the glass of poison milk glowing its way upstairs,

fluorescent white in a film noir.

 

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If I’m giving an introductory class to new readers or writers of poetry, I always start with examples of contemporary poems, usually a continent away from what most of us read and recited in high school. Atsuro Riley’s astonishing collection Romey’s Order comes to mind or an early prose poem by Marie Howe -- “Part of Eve’s Discussion.” I’d take the latter to the proverbial desert island if I could have only one document, as it examines the nature of thought itself. How nearly impossible it is to put that exploration in writing -- like trying to drive a nail into electricity -- and yet here it is on the page. Similarly, I return to an anthologized excerpt from Valérie Rouzeau’s book Cold Spring in Winter (Susan Wicks, trans.) that enacts one way the human brain handles panic and loss. I’m also attracted to works that create lyric biography, genre-bending books such as Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke and Michael Ondaatje’s transition from poet to novelist in Coming Through Slaughter with its embedded prose poems. For me, these books are teachers, and I love and revisit them. After reading anything written by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, I put down my pencil for a few days with the feeling that no one need ever write a poem again; but we all keep going, as I’m certain she would want. I think of my work as a historical record of a moment, past or present, that needs to be gotten down before the air changes and the thought escapes. To that end, I have a banker’s box of sticky-notes and scraps of paper, a gigabyte of notes on my phone, and a stack of sketchbooks. I go through them. I look for connections and think of possible architecture. I sit in my chair.

 

—Cecille Marcato

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Diane Melby

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Philosophy of :: Time :: Love

                                                           time applies to the realm

of becoming

​

That summer, you slow-stepped your way into manhood

while I, lonesome teen, entered the awkward years.

We turned brown. I fed you hamburgers, peanut butter.

From your chair high above the pool

you called me by name, called me beautiful.

​

                                                                               there is no time

without motion

​

Labor Day shook us apart 

but not before you took my hands, 

swung my feet off the ground,

set me down, moving forward.

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                                                     past present and future are all

illusions

          ***

I travel by train to see you.

Long after I awake

I remember     cancer      

spirited you away.

              ***

A glass-gray dawn – 

I float in shore waters

expecting you

to appear.

             ***

Naked, we fly

across violet skies

paint silver trails

with the vapor of our breath.

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                                                               time is not a property 

of the world

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My love, you transcend – 

bound not to age or sorrow,

exist not of earth nor sea.

Your voice an echo, 

the whisper of my soul.

__________________________________________________

(Philosophies of time attributed to Plato, Aristotle, Einstein, Kant)

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I write at an old secretary surrounded by views of blue mountains. There is a fireplace to warm me in winter and French doors that open into summer. Tall, taller than me, with glass doors securing three wood shelves and an oak desk that drops with the turn of a brass key. Inside, cubbies stuffed with old letters and the embryos of poems lined up on blue stickies. Look closely, you will find scars left by my mother-in-law and her mother and the mother before that. From me it will pass to my daughter but for now it is the center where my soul makes itself known. What then of the shelves? Open the glass, pull out the collection that catches your eye. Will it be Langston or Maya or Nikki today? Frost or Kooser or Bass? There are many more to choose from but open these and you will find poetry diagrammed in color, pages bookmarked with cat ears. Let your fingers wander across the second shelf, explore the works of ancient and modern philosophers. And the third shelf? No books at all. Just little boxes filled with treasure collected over six decades of wandering – shiny pebbles, alabaster seashells, translucent flower petals, fragile wings. Find on these shelves my spiritual base, my appreciation for the natural world, and my source of reconciliation with the afterlife. Just so, it is from these shelves that my poem, “Philosophy of :: Time :: Love” was born. Read of a young man who guides a child into adolescence. Know the young man is a metaphor for all the people given to help us move through life; and who stay with us even when death spirits their physical selves away.

 

—Diane Melby

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Persis R. Singh

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boxing day

 

he bought the gloves

two pairs

red with white laces.

he was 16. i was 14.

 

we went outside onto the pool’s wooden deck, under the mango tree.

i wondered where the housegirl was—if she was watching

and if that even mattered.

 

i had no choice. we laced up. he showed me how.

little professionals.

 

he stood in his punching stance

waiting for me. ready. patient.

once my fists felt snug in the gloves

i stood up. raised my head. my gloves were still moving 

into position—one to guard one to jab

copying the boxers i’d seen in the movies—

when my brother hit me.

i didn’t know what the solar plexus was.

i didn’t know what it would feel like to be punched there.

i fell to my knees on the deck. i realized i couldn’t breathe.

i felt confused and helpless. i couldn’t speak.

i thought i was dying.

 

i was aware of my brother’s loud laughter

his joy and delight

and i felt embarrassed

at how i must look

kneeling at his feet

making these strange gasping noises.

 

when i was able to breathe again

my brother had long gone—

his gloves flung at me in disgust

lay there in the tropical sun

shining and new.

 

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I’m on a Mary Oliver jag at present. Certain poems of hers are like receiving enlightenment, a personal experience of universal truths. But it was Rupi Kaur’s powerful first book, Milk and Honey, that galvanized me to write my own collection, of which “boxing day” is a part.

 

The truth of my life took a long time to come, and then it came in a flash. Everything fell into place instantly and I remembered Michael Douglas in the movie Falling Down, when he says in disbelief, “I’m the bad guy?” For me it was, “I’m a victim of abuse?” All my beliefs shattered—about everyone, including myself.

 

It heals me, writing poetry. The waves of inspiration materialize, without warning or fanfare—sudden gifts from some other place—and all that is required of me is to record. The side effects have been immeasurable: understanding and forgiveness, love and peace, a gentle compassion. And gratitude.

 

— Persis R. Singh

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Stephanie Striffler

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Rain on the Rogue River Trail

 

I wrote your name, daughter, in my notebook 

before I pulled the drawstring 

on the backpack cover

and hitched up my rustling rain pants.   

My notebook, blue like the one I placed                                                        

in the birthday package you never claimed.                   

I wanted you to know

you were my last thought 

before the misstep 

and the bone-crushing fall                                                                              

I was sure would come.

 

But the friends alongside me

showed me where to plant 

my trekking poles and when                       

to lend them my weight,

how to wedge my uphill foot                                                              

into the mud. 

One sure step                                                                          

at a time.

 

On storm-slickened moss                                           

they steadied me,                                                                                                                                             settled my breath while ahead the wind 

closed chainmail curtains of rain

around the exposed point.       

                                    

So easy now, daughter.  Not 

when I faced down the trail                                                                            

toward washout and scree.                                          

New words for you in my notebook:

Lean in to the cliff.                                                        

Lean away from the drop.

Turn toward an offered arm.

 

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Ada Limón’s poem “The First Lesson” speaks to me. She describes her mother taking apart a dead hawk and hanging its wing on her studio wall. In slowly paced lines Limón shares how she learned from her mother not to be scared, and to “watch / closely the world.” The mother took the bird in “like a stray / thing that needed warmth // and water.” I want to write with that kind of attention and bravery. As I have aged, my relationship to poetry as a way of enduring grief and celebrating joy has intensified. Poetry helps me to fully experience and share both. I feel less reluctant to be honest and concrete about what’s painful. And each day I become more aware that the moment is all we have.

 

“Rain on the Rogue River Trail” began almost as a found poem while I savored phrases from advice shared with me on a challenging long hiking trip. Ultimately the poem transformed into one of direct address to my daughter, who was not there physically, but whose presence also accompanied me on the trail.

 

—Stephanie Striffler

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Michelle D. Wise

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A Shieldmaiden’s Tale

 

I once flew with the Valkyries.

Poets called me bloodthirsty and

a demon of the dead. 

 

In time, my wings became 

riddled with feather mites,

and I fell and landed among 

dying warriors splayed 

out on the battlefield. 

 

Wrapping my tattered 

wings around me,

I heard the whispers 

of dying warriors 

begging me to 

lead them onward. 

 

But I was too weak.

My body harbored yours.

 

I shed my wings

making room 

for you. You tore 

through my body 

like stripping off a 

dollar store costume,

leaving it crumpled on

the tile floor. 

 

I knew that you would soar, 

when the wolves arrived 

and carried me away.

 

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I am both a writer and a photographer. It has taken me a long time to embrace those titles. Like many others, I struggle with the weight of Imposter Syndrome. In 2023, I decided to pursue my MFA in Visual Art to hone my photography skills and connect with other visual artists. Little did I realize how important my creative writing skills would be during this endeavor. I already hold degrees in English and teach literature and creative writing at the university level. However, during the MFA program, I was assigned a prompt to write about where I’m from. That prompt re-ignited my love for creative writing and poems such as this one were born. This poem was inspired by the birth of my daughter, who is currently a senior in high school. I am watching her soar as an aspiring songwriter while I continue to carve my space. The poem was also inspired by my love for mythology. Poets and writers who inspire me are Emily Dickinson, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Crystal Wilkinson, Lia Purpura, Kate DiCamillo, and so many more. When I read their words, it’s as if a current of electricity flows through my veins. I am also inspired by photographers who are visual poets: Francesca Woodman, Diane Arbus, Julia Margaret Cameron, Cindy Sherman, Lucas Samaras, Duane Michals and so many others. 

 

—Michelle D. Wise

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