Gail Bartlett

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Beyond the Pig Roast Behind the Renick School

 

 

When I was eighteen,

missing my boyfriend, and Aunt Barbara

had the ears to listen,

we stood behind the school ignoring 

the pig, smoking a cigarette.

 

I had taken a couple of aspirins before

watching the tractor parade.  Then

I walked the dark road 

back to the house.  No one home,

other than a few intruder noises.

 

I loaded the single shot 22. I traversed

the house -- kicking every door

to see who might have

made the noise.  No one home.

I was alone and concerned.

 

My father would later return home. . .

I placed the rifle across

the floor with a note.  I

couldn’t get the bullet out.

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What to leave — what to leave out when writing family-memory poems? Aunt Barbara may have taken a lady-like puff on my cigarette, but she didn’t smoke. I write regional and family poetry, and "Pig Roast" is one of those. The poems I love to write: the one whose title or first line appears and won’t leave. It might follow you.

 

The one that arrives as you write ‘in the zone’ trying to keep up as the poem races ahead. I admire Ruth Stone’s poem "Things I Say to Myself While Hanging Laundry." She left her laundry and went inside to jot down this brilliant poem. She said in an interview, “Never keep a poem waiting, it might be a really good one and, if you don’t get it down it’s lost.” Wise words.

 

I love poems of pure sound joy. Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare. In high school did you look in the mirror with girlfriends and recite “Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”? Thomas Wolfe was a novelist and yet he wrote “a stone, a leaf, an unfound door . . .” to begin Look Homeward, Angel.

​

Currently I am reading Jane Hirshfield’s early books (Given Sugar, Given Salt before After and Come, Thief), Jennifer Keith’s Terminarch, and revisiting Louise McNeill’s Gauley Mountain. The writers who influenced me in younger years: Katherine Anne Porter, Pearl S. Buck, Flannery O’Connor, the poems of Boris Pasternak and D.H. Lawrence, Edgar Allan Poe, Beatrix Potter, and Margaret Wise Brown. I cannot leave out Anne Sexton and Grace Cavalieri.

 

So old poems were left in drawers, notebooks, scraps of timesheets, like old lovers. I write new ones while searching for the past.

 

—Gail Bartlett

​

Laurel Benjamin

 

​

Like a Calf 

 

           —Erhard Seminars Training, Inc., (EST) founded by Werner Erhard, is loosely based on                                           Buddhism for self-improvement, and came to be known as a cult. 

 

My brother walks to the front of the conference room 

to unspool his story to other EST believers, the same boy

 

who hikes hills with us, weaving between cow after cow, 

as if they would not charge, udders suckling calves wobbling 

 

on new legs, fluff fur. I wonder, can this be him? I smell fear 

in the breath of these men and women who have given up meat 

 

and cutting their wrists, when they can no longer treat 

their flesh as inviolate. They cry. One woman covers 

 

her face with a scarf woven from the memory of another's 

childhood, losing herself. My father has decided to pretend, 

 

he's said, and if necessary will infuse my brother with meadows 

suffused with wildflowers, tie yarrow stems as shoe laces 

 

so my brother can stand when this is over. What my father 

will do. My brother's done rehab twice. What our mother 

 

refused to do—family therapy, not one word about quiet nights 

or how cows echo long notes for days when separated 

 

from their young, after the grass turns brown, when children 

have grown. Today, I'm conscripted by my father 

 

to this one session, because we must defend my brother 

at all costs. I am not hungry for human potential 

 

or ontology or transformation. Today, I can't help passing 

judgement on the light teal and pink decor. My brother's legs 

 

shake as he passes chair after chair to the mic. And I'm begging 

silently, Picture the sugar cookies mom made, her apron 

 

holding us, a life made of work and mothering. The hunger 

my brother was born with has everything to do 

 

with her. I want for him a life that will never exist. I call out 

but he doesn't hear. A narrow trail lined with wild oaks, 

 

corridor winding into the hills where he runs ahead 

of the group. As he starts to speak into the mic, 

 

I tell him, You must listen to the weeping of cows. 

 

 

 

After Franz Marc "Yellow Cow" (Germany) 1911

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2760

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Raised by a librarian and a social worker, I come with two minds to everything. My new book, Written into the Curve of the Sea's Open Throat (Shanti Arts, 2026), offers up my family's Jewish heritage, showing how compromise serves as a way to reconstruct guilt and mistakes, and survive. I remember my father arguing politics with a friend, and how they left the conversation half done, still friends. My mother was known for her precision and love of the arts. I grew up learning ballet, taking music lessons, attending ceramics classes, and at home busy with crafts. My brother and I invented a secret language, made up stories. Though I've written poetry since teen years, I recently started surrounding myself again with other poets. One group I started is dedicated to ekphrastic writing; the ethos is about community as much as writing. 

 

I am drawn lately to folktales and mythologies, to ghosts and angels. Magic can arise when juxtaposing different imagery or voices. Maria Zoccola's Helen of Troy, 1993 (Simon & Schuster, 2025), is a remarkable set of persona poems that channel the Greek gods and goddesses, created by an author who has read the myths since she was nine years old. In the poem "helen of troy returns to sparta," the ending lines take us to a vision: "i thought about our sputtering porch light, / how it would blind me, how it would shine / through my body in burning spears." Here Helen's old self returns to her home town, so she is both selves - old and new. The 'sputtering porch light' reflects the end of a war where she was spared, while other women were brutalized. 

https://www.laurelbenjamin.com

 

—Laurel Benjamin

 

​​

Jennifer Blackledge

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​​

My daughter sends a video from the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital 

 

with a falcon as big as her torso next to her.

Rows of raptors sit quietly

like a classroom of docile students. 

Small leather hoods sheath their heads and cover their eyes.

A mix of gyrfalcons, saker and peregrine; mostly female:

three times the size of males, and better hunters.

 

A handler theatrically walks the rows and 

waves a fresh-plucked quail carcass in front of them;

they cock their heads, listening, but cannot smell.

He says the hoods keep them calm, that their eyesight

is too good — so good it would drive them crazy

to be able to see in a confined space like this. 

They like the hoods, he says.

 

He hands the raw pink quail to my daughter and tells her

hold firmly, do not give it up, and moves the falcon 

from the perch to my daughter’s thick glove.

Her arm bows from the weight of

the now-hoodless bird, the quick lunge

that snaps the dead quail’s neck.

 

The other birds hear the crunch of bones

in the hard beak and start to shift, 

restless and excited.

They know how it feels to 

hurtle toward prey a mile away, eyes

locked in, hungry feathered missiles 

born to hunt. But at the last moment,

 

a well-trained falcon remembers 

who she serves, the gloved arm,

the hood in hand, and she

delivers the meal whole and wriggling,

neck intact. From seven thousand miles away

I watch my daughter’s face

as the quail sinews pull and snap: 

the awe and horror of wings and talons,

all that power, all that restraint,

the restive and too-clear eye 

that sweeps the room.

​

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​

After marrying a naval officer, my daughter was living in amazing places and traveling the world. I was so happy she had found the perfect partner to do these things with, but I also worried about the long-term effects of shifting her own career ambitions and goals into neutral as a military spouse. I worried about her isolation thousands of miles away during the pandemic and the loneliness of living at the edges of a different culture and language. 

Sometimes the tool to untangle a problem and smooth it into a poem shows up unexpectedly. One short video suddenly gave me a way to talk about the mixed feelings and contradictions I’d been marinating in for the past five years: me watching her as she watches birds of prey, women’s freedom and captivity and constraints, flight and tethers, how the ambitions I had for her intertwined with my own. And of course, on top of it all, missing her terribly while cheering her on.

For me, writing a poem feels like the relief of defining a problem and sometimes solving it: if I can find the right words and put them in the right order, I can bring something that’s been lurking in my peripheral vision into focus right in front of me. Then I can move on. 

​

—Jennifer Blackledge

​

Polly Brown

​
 

Axis

 

 

The second vertebra on the chain of your spine,

the axis bone in your neck, lets your skull swivel 

on its perch: lets you turn to see a catbird squalling 

behind you—or danger pounding down the block 

or the neighbor hollering warning. Turn side to side 

keeping track of basketball, a string quartet, 

an argument between parents. Look here, look there, 

when lost. Now I ask my axis bone to help me 

follow this water, flowing again, after drought: 

trickle along a fold between fields, pond at my feet, 

outlet brook toward the south. River’s nearby,          

but low in its channel, unseen—only revealed, 

if we turn that way, in a gulf of distance between 

far green trees and a blue hill, farther.

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“Axis” was a gift from Alice Roberts, British paleontologist and anatomist. Recently I reread her book The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being, about human evolution and development—written for someone like me, with minimal formal background in biology but an ongoing deep curiosity. It turns out that a willingness to double-read paragraphs (using a persistence learned from reading poems) can let me tackle amazing things, like Roberts’s descriptions of bones in the spine. 

 

Right away the poem moved into reasons why we turn to look around us, or behind us. I wasn’t surprised to discover worries about safety: for myself, for people I love, for strangers, including thousands of immigrants still needed but suddenly unwelcome. 

 

But there are other reasons for looking around, or back and forth. Only an odd absent-mindedness let me be surprised, when this poem—focused on turning—turned itself, in its last lines, toward a watershed pathway I’ve known all my life and finally live in. And then kept turning, toward the unseen further path.

 

Hooray for the evolved miracles of our bodies! And for language, and poetry, and readers!   

pollybrownpoet.com

 

—Polly Brown

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Wendy Mitman Clarke

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​

Running Tide 

 

Open your eyes. I know it’s hard.

Time wants to seal them shut 

against the dawn. 

But out at the jetty the terns are diving.

 

Time wants to seal your eyes shut.

But the running tide purls and knits the water

out at the jetty where the terns are diving,

weaving the inexorable leaving.

 

The running tide purls and knits the water,

exposing ridges of sand carved hard as spine

and weaving the inexorable leaving.

It will turn, eventually.

 

Exposed, the ridges of sand carved hard as spine

are gathered by the gulls and the rockweed streaming.

It will turn, eventually.

The long conversation between the moon

 

and the gulls and rockweed streaming

joins all that’s hidden beneath the glittering surface.

In long conversation with the moon,

it will turn.

 

While all is hidden beneath the glittering surface,

it will turn.

It will turn and then

it will turn again.

 

It will turn.

Out here, the earth is breathing,

and as it turns

so are you, whether you know it or not.

 

Out here, the earth is breathing. 

Every moment here is moving,

and so are you, whether you know it or not.

From the first word to this all has changed.

 

Every moment here is moving,

yet all has stayed the same.

From the first word to this all has changed.

All you can do is bear witness to your transience,

 

while all has stayed the same.

Be shattered, be grateful.

All you can do is bear witness to your transience

and know that nothing here can stay.

 

Be shattered, be grateful,

though time wants to seal your eyes shut.

Nothing here can stay. 

Open your eyes. I know it’s hard. 

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The natural world has always been my only real church, the center of any religion I could claim. It's where in the midst of grief and despair I can always find hope and beauty. It's why I always return to two poems: Wendell Berry's "The Peace of Wild Things," and Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese." My poem comes from that place, precisely. I was in Maine for the funeral of a friend. I had woken at dawn and walked a long beach out to a jetty, where I watched the outbound tide and the rockweed swaying with its passage and the terns and birds marking it with their hunting. I found peace in that ancient ebb and flow, and a kind of blessing for my friend, and for me, left behind, again. What the tide pulled in me, I tapped into my iPhone's notes app (a trick my daughter told me when I was without pen and paper). Later, I reformed it into a pantoum, whose rhythm and repetition so perfectly reflects the steady heartbeat of the tide and the sea. 

 

—Wendy Mitman Clarke

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Christa Fairbrother

​

​

Farriers Don’t Drive Ferries Either

 

You kill small animals,

   the checker accused, hand to heart, spewing

venom splatters atop my Washington winter 

   head-to-toe mud. No, No, I soothe. 

I’m not a furrier.  I shoe horses.

   She was never so relieved by three small words.

Not usually confronted by dirty women,

   she’d asked what I do for a living.

I was used to being an object of curiosity,

   the only woman on the island to shoe horses,

not just my island, any island.

   I hadn’t always wanted to be a farrier,

it was a settle, into a knock-kneed

   crouch holding a thousand pounds of mule,

chestnut, stubborn as a pecan that won’t open.

   First day of farrier training, skill number one

how to take horseshoes off-

   clip the clinches on eight nails,

slip one heel, wrench to center,

   pull the other, off it pops

one-minute tops in my future life as a not furrier.

   But not on my first day.

I shook harder than an earthquake

   stealing pine tree needles, 

naked and exposed with only a Greek

   chorus of men fielding commentary

which wasn’t meant to steady.

   Never let them see you sweat

didn’t apply in June’s high desert

   pounding anvils, whispering to the iron, 

be my lucky day.

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As readers, we are cautioned not to see poems as autobiographical, but to remember that the poem describes the speaker’s experiences. However, in this case, the speaker is an autobiographical one. I was a professional farrier on Whidbey Island, Washington, for ten years.  

 

The poem’s title references a common misunderstanding. If you live on an island and you’re a farrier, which sounds like “ferrier” (actually farrier in French), you must drive a ferry. And then it moves into another misunderstanding, based on the island’s history of raising mink on fur farms.  Having a unique job, usually done by men, led to some interesting conversations over the years.

 

I loved the job, but as you can imagine, it was very physically demanding, and I had to move on.  Now that I’m writing poetry, work is an interesting poetic subject and not one you see all the time. The anthology, What Things Cost, edited by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley M. Jones, 

with associate editor Emily J. Jalloul, has some very interesting poems about work. "Untitled" (it’s about firefighters) by Kevin Goodan, I find especially compelling.

 

I’m drawn to poets who use language in interesting ways, such as Alice Oswald, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, and Rachel Carson. And "Question," about the value of horses and dogs and bodies, by May Swenson, is the only poem I know by heart.

 

—Christa Fairbrother

 

Terry Hall 

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​

Portrait of a Marriage as Fainting Goat

 

We butt heads, we ruminate, we cud chew 

for fodder every cut, every slight. What’s 

unvoiced collects like dust beneath 

 

the double bed. My hope gets tethered 

to your rigid thinking, grass worn to dirt 

in a wheel that won’t turn.

 

Our toddler daughter sobbing in her high chair.

The heightened impatience of your rebuke.

I kick the kitchen cabinet, I smash a plate—

 

it all pitches over, glasses shattered in the sink.

You consult your cache of facts and, like so often, 

make things worse. I shut down. I walk away.

 

No one calls a counselor, calls a farmer, calls a vet.

No one stays to notice if it gets back up.

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I have loved the written word from the moment I learned to read. What worlds words contain! Language is to poets what line and color are to painters—that is to say, everything. I write poems to make meaning of my experiences; I read poems to know I do not experience life alone. The poets who ground me: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Cathy Smith Bowers, Claudia Emerson, Diane Seuss. The poem I carry with me everywhere: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W. B. Yeats.

 

—Terry Hall

​

Leslie Hodge

​

​

Chemin de Fer

​

Trains had names then, like Catalán-Talgo, Le Mistral. 

They embraced us with their speed and subtle rocking. 

In the bar car, we drank wine— Côtes du Rhône, 

Mâcon-Villages—while the golden countryside

flowed on rows of windows. The sun at last slid westward, 

slanting down to touch lavender and sunflowers. 

Without talking, we watched it slowly fall for hours.

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In college, I majored in English and Creative Writing, but then spent 40+ years working in business. After retiring, I wanted to go to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. I thought I should write a poem to read at an open mic, so I did. “I Am Not a Cowgirl” is the poem that started it all.

 

After studying for a year with San Diego’s first Poet Laureate, Ron Salisbury, I helped organize a weekly Poetry Salon for sharing, workshopping, encouragement and poetry readings. 

 

Contemporary poets have influenced me the most, and include Melissa McKinstry, TR Poulson, Michael Mark (Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening Than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet), Taylor Byas (I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times), Julia B. Levine (Ordinary Psalms), Rebecca Foust (You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems), Faith Shearin (Telling the Bees), Alison Luterman (In the Time of Great Fires), and Valentina Gnup (Ruined Music). 

 

I greatly admire Poulson’s skill with rhyme, and Gnup’s heart-felt humanity. Influenced by Byas, I enjoy experimenting with form, including duplex, sonnet, double golden shovel, and abecedarian. 

 

My poem “Chemin de Fer” was inspired by a form created by Erin Murphy (Swoon: New & Selected Poems) called the demi-sonnet. I hope the poem invokes the dreaminess of high-speed rail travel over distance and across time. And maybe a line from Yeats: “Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?”

 

—Leslie Hodge

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Luci Huhn

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​

To the Top of Wave Mountain

                        

after a painting by Casey McGlynn

 

How many road trips did we take with a canoe 

strapped to the roof of the station wagon, 

keeping track of clouds, airplanes, any haystack 

or hill we could label a mountain, 

while the dog whined in the way-back?

 

I remember we passed the city where I would later

escape. A poster of an ark flapped in the wind – maybe 

we needed saving – promise of giraffe on deck, promise 

of elephant – the ark rusting in the dirt near the harbor,

part submarine, part warship.

 

In the country, horses bent to mounds of hay. And birds 

flew over. There were always birds. What was it, 

nineteen-sixty? Mother liked quiet, stayed home. 

Our Aunt traveled with us, sat beside me in my

smallness, a big encyclopedia across our laps, 

 

blue whale stretched from left margin to right, 

a tiny human drawn in the belly for scale. My Aunt held 

the pages flat while the waves of the road rocked us, 

helped me see that with some ballast even I might 

wade through krill and debris, the length of a whale.

 

But this is folklore, this story. We counted calves 

and chickens through car windows, drew elephants

instead, rhinos, their tusks skyward. Like everyone, 

we bounced on a playground see-saw, 

burnt marshmallows around a camp-fire. 

 

When we boarded the canoe, Father supervised 

from the stern – Mother a ghost – the smallest of us 

crowding the bow, rowing against the waves, rowing,

rowing. Every one of us afraid to be happy.

 

And overhead, the sky dripped down – turquoise to 

azure to lavender – careless blocks of dull and light.

​

https://caseymcglynn.com/products/whats-on-top-of-wave-mountain-by-casey-mcglynn50x70-cm-28x20

 

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For a long time, I’ve held in memory the last page of one of our childhood encyclopedia volumes and its image of a blue whale stretched from margin to margin, with a tiny man drawn next to it for perspective. When a beloved Aunt passed away a couple of years ago, I wrote several poems about that overwhelming loss, while the whale image floated around and around and finally found its place here. I remember my Aunt sitting with me at the end of my parents' bed (she was the only babysitter they trusted), or with me in the back seat of the station wagon (she often traveled with us to Northern Michigan while my Mother took a break from us all), the huge book spread across our laps. She was a teacher, and she enlightened me about the whale’s wonders or let me babble on about my endless fascination with a creature of this size and color. 

 

For inspiration, I often go back to Elizabeth Bishop, Diane Seuss or Marie Howe for their unique voices and narrative abilities – detailed and deeply personal, gritty and full of gravitas. And to so many other great writers tackling the complexities of being human. I’m fortunate to be part of a writing group asked this year to write and share an ekphrastic poem. I struggled with that assignment before looking up at the print with the whale by Casey McGlynn right there on the wall of my studio. So often poems come from an image that won’t let go, or even a single word.

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—Luci Huhn

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Jeanne Julian

​​​​​

​​​

Near Deaths (and aftermaths)

 

By sled, striking a pine (reclaimed breath in a gasp) 

By appendix, bursting like a grenade (weeks in hospital obsessing over homework undone)

By rip current, sweeping my paddleboard toward the deep (earned a Lifeguard Certification)

By sailboat, sinking in Lake Erie storm (puked in the hold of the Coast Guard cutter)

By Manhattans, infiltrating bloodstream (lying in roadside buckthorn 'til Chip said are you okay)

By Pontiac, hydroplaning on I-91 (junkyard dog devouring doughnuts scattered in the wreckage)

By trail mismarked, hiking Maine wilderness in late fall (rescued by a banker hunting grouse)  

By bed, holding my best-loved at his life’s ending (learning to breathe, again)

 

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For the origin of this poem, I give credit to a workshop on “tone” led by Sally Bliumis-Dunn, who offered the idea of writing a “list” poem. I find that prompts often serve as shovels for us to dig up latent memories, ideas, or images that otherwise might have languished undiscovered in our psyches. My mother’s books from her courses as a college English major were an early influence: I remember Browning and Shelley. Unfortunately, these days I’m often reminded of Shelley’s line, “"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"” I confess to moving on, as a teenager, to Rod McKuen, whose body of work (as The Poetry Foundation rather discreetly puts it) “is not often the subject of academic inquiry”—but he did sell over 60 million books. Maybe he was the pre-internet version of Rupi Kaur, although he didn’t pose with Valentino bags. Now I’m reading books by poets you probably won’t have heard of, and maybe as a result neglecting the well-known. But these writers are wonderful! Catherine W. Carter, Beth Copeland, Stelios Mormoris, Gus Peterson, Sean Sexton, Betsy Sholl, Heather Treseler. Etc. I also read the mélange that pops into my inbox from Rattle and poem-a-day from Poets.org. All, often, provide Aha! moments of understanding, revelation, or connection. Maybe that’s what keeps me writing: the hope that a poem will click with someone, somewhere. 

 

—Jeanne Julian

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Jennifer Mills Kerr

​

 

Litany of Hunger

 

Seated on a bench along the long corridor of afternoon. 

Sober seven days. 

 

Across an endless street surging exhaust, brick buildings 

weighted by shadows 

 

I yearn to shake into daylight. Hurried pedestrians pass, 

focused on footsteps

 

crossing to-do lists; perhaps like me they struggle to escape 

some toxic ritual; 

 

perhaps they wander the perimeters of town until blanched 

by fatigue. 

 

Wind scribbles a nearby birch, an urgent prayer I still 

can’t understand. 

 

Let it release its yellow leaves, so I can catch what’s fallen. 

Let every minute 

 

chafe the tight lasso of my mother’s name. Let every darkened 

alleyway guide me away 

 

from children almost born. My beggar’s bowl, round with appetite. 

I count pink tulips, I cradle ashes.

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It takes me months to write a poem. With "Litany of Hunger," I had no idea what I wanted or needed to say (which happens frequently). So I began by describing place as specifically as possible. After weeks, I surfaced from the poem and realized why I sat on that bench for so long. It’s amazing the blind spots I dance around in poetry–but whenever I’m fearful or uncomfortable, I know I’m onto something. 

​

—Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Sara McAulay

​

​

two a.m.

 

orange stripes across her sweat-slick face

winter sunset paints a pallid zigzag, rests

a spectral thumb against her throat  

thin pulse threading on and on 

                                                                   dog-eared paperback: 

                                                                         nightstand neruda 

and on and no and on  

and houses on the street 

keep on resembling 

their yesterday selves 

                                                                  beside a yellow orchid 

                                                              stubbornly still blooming 

their normal rhythms on 

and on, shuffling one 

gulped breath, one same old 

tuesday against another 

                                                                             morphine bottle 

                                                                                   one-third full 

another choking spasm and 

the iron-maiden pain    

I’m helpless, frozen, on my knees

                        

                                                               how much would it take? 

 

limbic spark and afterglow: 

night air jumps, gentles, buzzing  

                                                                         a drop? a dropper- 

                                                                                                  ful?                                                                

sleeping cat uncoils, jumps  

from the bed

                                                                        a breath     another 

                                                          another     curse or blessing 

across the street 

a car door slams 

                                                                                    in this room 

                                                                       suddenly and always 

                                                                                     it’s two a.m. 

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Artist’s statement, short version: A novelist walks into a poetry workshop...

 

The essential question: Who would I be if ...? 

          My father hadn’t died when I was ten;

          his mother, my Granny, hadn’t lived with us until I was nine;

          my family hadn’t owned a summer cabin on the Chesapeake Bay, where I spent my first

          ten summers barefoot in a bathing suit, pestering the many scientists who also summered                   there.

 

I come from a long line of storytellers. Granny enthralled me with tales of growing up on a homestead in northern Minnesota, on Dakota land. Her stories inform my writing to this day. My father was as a civil engineer who understood and loved the poetry of the rocks and earth he studied, and passed that on to me. He was imaginative and funny—two qualities I most admire. Of the hand-tinted photo of him taken in Bolivia in 1938 or 39 (where he was involved in planning for what would be the Pan-American Highway), he explained that the parrot perched on his wrist was trying to engage him in conversation. “He didn’t speak any English,” said my dad, “and my Spanish was basura.” They’d had to hire an interpreter, he said. My mother’s stories were about her Virginia childhood, the mischief she and her brothers got into. It took me longer than it should have to recognize that there were stories she wasn’t telling, and to start asking questions. That was a process still unfinished when she died. 

 

That unfinishedness, that unease, like the strength and positivity of my grandmother’s stories and my father ‘s love of the natural world, in one way or another underpin everything I write.

 

—Sara McAulay

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Jill Michelle

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Bride

 

n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.

            —Ambrose Bierce

 

Before the vows, the calamities of lost 

townhouses, rotating holidays

before the domestic scene

hunger to leave the killjoy

parents back home

the yin and yang of 

male advice / female silence 

sobs behind locked doors

her first marital lessons

all she wants to avoid repeating

 

repeating all she wants to avoid

her first marital lessons

sobs behind locked doors

male advice / female silence

the yin and yang of

parents back home

hunger to leave the killjoy

domestic scene after the

rotating holidays, houses, towns

calamities of the lost, after the vows.

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For the last five years or so, I’ve been happily building a collection titled The She-Devil’s Dictionary, which responds to definitions from Ambrose Bierce’s 1906 work, The Devil’s Dictionary (originally published as The Cynic’s Word Book). Having loved this text as both a student and teacher for three decades, I’m delighted to be interacting with Bierce’s dictionary as a poet now, especially considering that he did too, composing some of his own poems to go with definitions in the original work. 

 

A lot of The Devil’s Dictionary definitions take me straight to a moment in my life, a specific story, but reflecting on the definition given for bride, “a woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her,” was different in that it reminded of discussions with a host of different women on the topic of marriage and their shared reasons for/expectations of becoming a bride. Maya Angelou revealed in her 1990 Paris Review interview that “[s]ometimes I make a character from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in any one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about,” and that’s how I felt about including only my marital experiences in response to this quote. As far as form, sadly, the “happiness [being] behind” the married woman was repeated in many of the narratives shared by family members and friends, hence the echoing structure of the palindrome felt right, as did breaking the form in the opening and closing lines with the word change from “before” the vows in the first line to “after” in the last.

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—Jill Michelle

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Abbey J. Porter

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The Art of Falling

 

I’ve fallen from horses

without fracture

Fallen from grace in a thousand ways 

in my own eyes and others’

Slapped the dust from my thighs and shuffled on

 

I didn’t so much fall out of love 
as was shoved. My teeth rattled 

on landing.

 

I haven’t fallen from a pedestal—

haven’t been on one. I prefer to keep 

my sneakered feet on the ground.

 

But I suppose I’m a fallen woman,

depending on where you stand.

 

I’ve fallen apart, in slow and sudden ways.

 

Though I fell far from the tree, hit hard

My skin remains unbroken, sweeter 
at the bruise.

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I write both poetry and memoir to understand and express myself, process emotions, and lend (relative) permanence to what otherwise might be lost.

 

For me, writing is partly a matter of inquiry. I don’t know, when I start, exactly where I’ll end up. That was the case with “The Art of Falling.” In the process of drafting, revising, and finding my way through, and to, the poem, I came to know myself a bit better, see myself in a different light. I felt, by turns, both playful and deeply reflective as I considered my “falling” and what it means.

 

A poem I’ve integrated into my psyche is Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise,” a gently profound lesson in gratitude. John Berryman is among the poets who keep me coming back; his work is accessible enough to engage but dense and layered enough to intrigue, to leave room for my wondering. But my favorite poem may be Wallace Stevens’s “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”—I long to feel that, yes, “everything is meant for you / And nothing need be explained.”

 

Connecting with others nourishes and sustains me. Because I so highly value such connection, my primary goal in writing is to share myself and my experience with my reader. I also aim to make my reader feel something—my personal barometer for “good” writing. I hope that I have achieved these aims with “The Art of Falling.”

 

—Abbey J. Porter

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Andrea Potos

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AFTER 50, I START WEARING

LAURA ASHLEY DRESSES AGAIN

 

Years ago I gave so many away,

as if they were too modest

or not modern enough;

and now I’m seeking them out on eBay:

as new, only slightly worn,

 

eager to enter my day as if gliding,

no longer caring for what level of sexy

or in fashion I am supposed to be,

wanting the comfort of baby-wale corduroy

falling like feathers across my skin or

like my grandmother’s hands;

 

floral displays of skirts and dresses

past the knee or just above the ankle,

the flowing of the fabric as if I am carrying

rivers or streams or lost gardens

of peonies and roses, vines

trailing the floor behind me as I go.

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Even the name made me swoon a little:  Laura Ashley. Their beautiful, feminine fabrics and clothes, originating in England, spoke to me in ways I couldn’t describe. In the late 1980s, I worked for a while in a Laura Ashley shop near Chicago. I made pilgrimages to Laura Ashley shops in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Edinburgh and London. This was around the same time I began my daily morning writing practice. The two are now inextricably linked:  beauty and poetry.  

 

With my coffee, I begin the day at my desk in my garret room, or sometimes in a nearby cafe that’s conducive to working. This dailiness and attention has become a spiritual practice for me.  I love to start out by reading other poets; their words and images place me in a more receptive place where I believe the muse might find me. Poetry books that I’ve returned to again and again in the last few years include those by Wendell Berry, Alberto Rios, Patrick Kavanagh, Paula Meehan, Lisel Mueller, Bethany Reid, Faith Shearin, Denise Duhamel, Kim Dower, Ted Kooser and Sally Necker.  Of course there are many more.  I am always buying poetry books, both used and new.  Just like I always seem to be searching for “new” Laura Ashley clothes; I am sad that I gave away so many years ago, but grateful I have re-connected with the joy and the beauty they gave me. 

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—Andrea Potos

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Ellen Romano

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Woman Holding a Balance

            After Johannes Vermeer

 

I chose to bring her into my delivery room,

pregnant like me, though serene in white veil and cuffs,

holding a scale. Strands of pearls are laid out before her

on a blue cloth, unevenly lit by the light from a high window.

 

I am panting and screaming through my contractions,

like the human mothers before me, cursed by God,

In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.

 

Our narrow pelvises, our big-headed babies.

But, oh, the marvelous brains those large skulls

contain, conveying across the centuries

light illuminating the shadows of one particular

room in the Netherlands, the concept of Judgement

depicted in a painting on the wall of that room,

the woman at the center, about to re-enact

the ongoing drama between pain and joy,

holding a balance between thumb and delicate forefinger,

about to find out where the weight of it lies.

 

https://www.nga.gov/artworks/1236-woman-holding-balance

 

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I learned to read early and novels were my refuge throughout my childhood. It wasn't until I discovered the line, "Love calls us to the things of this world" by Richard Wilbur nearly fifty years ago that I realized the power of poetry. Some of my favorites from those days were Galway Kinnell, Norman Dubie, and Denise Levertov. Somehow once I married, had my children, and became an elementary school teacher I didn't feel I had time for poetry, though I still enjoyed reading fiction and historical non-fiction. I was planning to write a novel of my own when I retired, but my husband died suddenly when I was sixty-three and when I tried to write as a way to process my grief, all that came out was poetry. When I discovered Marie Howe's What the Living Do I began looking for other poets and their insights into the grieving process, and in those days it seemed to me that every poet was writing about grief. Later I read poets like Ada Limón and Elizabeth Alexander and began to feel that every poet was writing about grief, and love, and, in the words of Ross Gay, unabashed gratitude all at the same time. I hope I never again come to feel that I don't have time for all that poetry offers. I am currently reading The Undressing by Li-Young Lee and Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, a young adult novel written as a series of poems.

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—Ellen Romano

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Yiskah Rosenfeld

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Permission

 

Half Dome at dawn. That rock 

that looks like a bear where the trail forks.

 

The secret corner of your jaw I visited.

Hidden pond concealed by trees.

 

The last table 

at the back of Cole Coffee.

 

To have permission to touch, first skier

sliding twin waves down fresh, blank snow.

 

Covert thrill of slipping unnoticed

into cathedrals, carved rosewood, tinted glass.

 

You didn’t ask why take time to brush fingers

along the delicate line from ear to neck,

 

trace the mysterious ridge of clavicles,

count each rib in kisses. I didn’t answer

 

to seek access, your skin the soft-sealed envelope 

of an invitation to be indivisibly whole.

 

Let me in, I didn’t say.

Before you enter, let me in.

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                                "I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear

                                 Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace."

                                                                                        - Charles Wright

 

I’ve carried these lines from “Reunion” in my metaphorical pocket ever since Charles Wright was the writer-in-residence at Oberlin College in the ’80s. They are my mantra, they resonate inside like a bell. 

 

The world is too big for me. I love poetry because each poem is a little universe I can inhabit. I feel this way whether reading a poem or writing one. There are boundaries to contain it, like a small wooden garden bed in a sea of weeds and chaos. As with the garden, the containers of page and form allow for infinite creativity inside restraint. I find it so comforting to enter a poem on its own terms. To explore, plant, prune, and listen always for its heart.

 

“Permission” is a rare love poem for me. I attempt to veer away from cliché by circling around it with images that can stand alone or as metaphor with plenty of space for what is best unspoken. I am very much a poet of place, of witness, hyper-attuned to what is in front of me: tea at a cafe, a zucchini in the garden, a chair in my bedroom on a writing retreat. This poem alludes to many of these places. It is, in a way, its own artist statement.

 

My debut collection Tasting Flight and first chapbook Naked Beside Fish came out two months apart in 2024. I now find myself in that strange, liminal place Louise Glück spoke about: the silence that comes after a book is completed, not knowing what will come. I find it terrifying and exhilarating. If another book does take shape, may it surprise me, may it untie me.

 

—Yiskah Rosenfeld

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Cynthia Ventresca

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After Court: Morning of My Divorce

 

I find you on 12th street, cleaning windows,

suspended from the roof of the savings and loan 

by a rope, a strategic knot. I holler:

he never showed, I’m free! 

You bounce from the eaves with both legs 

boot soles dancing a two-step nine stories high. 

As I look up, shield my eyes, the building’s glass 

becomes a mirror, another world 

where your shadow looms mid-air and why can’t we 

live there—leave all that’s jagged behind 

in this courtyard or tossed in the Brandywine River 

across the street? Everything seems still, the water, 

the air—like that pause as you inhale deep

before beginning again. 

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With poetry I press on what remains tender or unhealed, what is beyond love, loss, grief, and the aftershocks. It is an examination of altered connections, spaces emptied, changed, the complexities of relationships—with people, animals, earth, self. With a seed pushing through dirt in a yard the size of a postage stamp. In my twenties, I stopped writing while I did those things we do during those years. The hiatus lasted two decades, and when I began again it was like turning on a rusted faucet to nothing but a brown trickle. Now, I keep writing to keep the water flowing.

 

Although much of my work is free verse, I try to accept whatever emerges and am thrilled when a prose poem or some other form shows up. With “After Court: Morning of my Divorce” I revised until the line breaks reflected the music I heard in my head. By the time I was somewhat satisfied, the poem was fourteen lines but with its own self-chosen rhythms, sound schemes, and breaks. An American sonnet.

 

It would be impossible to list all the writers that have influenced me, though some are--the Brontës, D.H. Lawrence, James Wright, Louise Glück, Kim Addonizio. I just finished Dear Beast by Catherine Pierce and admire the way the poems speak, in such lush language I had to suck in my breath at times, of not just the “wolves”—those fears we live with, but the indestructible beauty that survives them. 

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—Cynthia Ventresca

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