​

Jacqueline Berger

​

​

The Feeling of Will-Be-Over

 

Finally, I believe I will die.

The feeling-knowledge arrives 

a little like the smell of eucalyptus, 

a medicine-cabinet smell.

Or is it more the sour of old ice

from the encrusted freezer’s snow cove 

back when bowls of hot water melted walls.

Or tar, or turpentine

in coffee tins, after-school oil painting,

little studio off Pico, 

every Wednesday for years,

the rag dipped then rubbed on hands

to remove cadmium or cobalt

from the stand of trees

I’d rendered valiantly

if naively all afternoon.

 

I am grateful for nothing,

what I know of it, 

the studio long gone,

my teacher dead, my mom as well,

and the Pinto she picked me up in

famously recalled for bursting

into flames on impact.

.

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One of my favorite poems is Jack Gilbert’s “Finding Something.” His beloved is dying, and the poet is wide open in his feelings, and the poem is so generous with its gifts. I only wish I could make better use of these gifts, beginning with his opening line: “I say moon is horses in the tempered dark, / because horse is the closest I can get to it.” To my mind, this is a perfect lesson in trusting the power of the image while at the same time acknowledging the distance between ourselves and even our most intimate moments. Then, too, the ending of the poem slays me: “The arches of her feet are like voices / of children calling in the grove of lemon trees, / where my heart is as helpless as crushed birds.” How are feet like voices? I don’t know, but they are. And not just any voices, but children’s voices in a grove. And those lemon trees! And don’t get me started on crushed birds. Again, such faith that an image can both lift us beyond while lowering us more fully into. 

​

—Jacqueline Berger

​

Isabelle Bohl

 

 

Some Nights, When Thoughts of Tomorrow Narrow, I Choose

to Dream of Her

 

                           The world was so new…things lacked names.

                                                          —Gabriel Garcia Márquez

 

She dens beneath a fallen aspen,

for only a giant can shelter another.

 

Involute shadow tucked in cold,

she rests in her silent burrow,

her romping cubs having moved on

before summer’s shenanigans.

 

But her body is mum also,

as even a mast year can’t nudge

an aging bear into fire.

 

I envy her mute world

uttering no worries,

her faith in a coded future.

 

And I,

fallow of hands and womb, summon her,

as I think of my daughters, and my mother,

who recently revealed how aging speeds up with time,

how a single year scars your body like two

near the end.

​

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​

I began writing poetry to preserve my family’s stories in France and share them with my daughters who grew up in the United States. Soon I realized that there were many more topics I could tackle as poems. I began writing to help me make sense of our complicated world, encouraged by my friend and mentor jim bourey.

​

My husband and I live in a cabin on a hill in the middle of woods where I am inspired by nature every day. This is why I love Mary Oliver’s poetry, the way she gracefully weaves her reflections with the natural world. I am also drawn to the work of Joy Harjo for her delicate connection to the Earth while telling the story of her people. I believe much clarity can be found in nature.

​

This poem was inspired by the black bears that live around us. Though they are secretive, they leave signs that let us know they thrive nearby. They are a source of strength to me, so I chose to mesh the story of an older female bear with my own. I am indebted to the people at The North American Bear Center & Northwoods Ecology Hall in Minnesota, specifically Spencer Peter, who patiently answered my questions on bear feeding habits and reproduction. They do good work.

​

—Isabelle Bohl

​

Wendy Mitman Clarke

​
 

Flight Feather

 

Here is the terminology; 

maybe it will help.

 

The shaft is like an obsidian arrow

thin and precise as a needle at the top 

 

thickening toward the quill further down,

pale grey now but perhaps bloodied 

 

when it happened, the flight feather blown

from the wing. Its vanes fan out on each side

 

like silk when I smooth them with my fingers,

interlocked by an invisible geometry of barbs.

 

And the design—that’s what caught my eye

of course, that and the spray of them—

 

so many strewn from the impact.

Morse code of black dots, white dashes,

 

an immaculate pattern that lends 

the downy woodpecker its tuxedoed appearance, 

 

“a very fresh look,” says my guidebook, appreciatively.

Clearly, it drew the eye of an owl, or maybe a sharp-

 

shinned hawk, some taloned Hiroshima hungry

as winter approaches. One by one I pick up

 

what’s left, these scattered shadows of symmetry, 

knowing I’ll never see it coming either. 

​

൪

 

I’ve always found solace and wonder in the natural world, the way it mirrors so much in our lives, the daily small miracles of survival. It’s not surprising that Mary Oliver speaks most deeply to me. Poetry helps me find words for what I cannot say out loud or in prose. In a way, it lets me hide my pain in plain sight, giving it a way to light. I feel immense gratitude for that.

​

—Wendy Mitman Clarke

​

Brittney Corrigan

​
 

Duplex with Ship of Theseus

 

What do I recognize of myself

at the end of this unknitted year?

 

            At the end of this year, unknitted

            from a marriage that ferried me three decades.

 

Three decades of marriage have carried me

to an unexpected shore, and my body

 

            is my body, sure, but an unexpected

            mooring turns my breasts to sand and sea.

 

Mourning, I see my breasts and hands turn

unfamiliar. Older and untouched.

 

            Older, untouched, unfamiliar and

            still the kernel of my heart is figurehead.

 

My heart is figureheaded, still. Eternal.

What I recognize, my truest self.

 

൪

 

Each December, I participate in a poem-a-day challenge with an ever-expanding group of fellow poets. Over the course of the month, we share the fresh, raw drafts with each other, providing words of encouragement along the way in order to be in community and mark the end of the year together. It’s a practice I look forward to each winter, and this past December even more so, as I was one year into a separation from my husband and on the brink of finalizing our divorce. Inspired by poets like Sharon Olds, Maggie Smith, and Jessica Pierce—all of whom have written so eloquently about the end of their marriages and how women experience that life shift in our bodies, minds, and relationships—I wanted to try my hand at creating poems about my own new state of being. I also wanted to find an appropriate container to hold my complex emotions, and I decided to experiment with form. I had been intrigued for some time by the duplex, a contemporary poetic form invented by Jericho Brown. The rules of repetition built into the duplex feel both ruminative and meditative to me, and I had a feeling I could get to the core of my experience through this vessel. I started writing a series of duplexes, each driven by an object or concept with which I’ve had a longtime fascination. The Ship of Theseus paradox, which asks whether a ship that has all of its components replaced over time is actually the same ship in the end, became an apt metaphor for my transition through divorce as a middle-aged woman in a middle-aged body. By morphing the repeated lines as I moved through the duplex, I was able to celebrate my own metamorphosis into a singular—and whole—being.

​

—Brittney Corrigan

​

Barbara Crooker

​

​

LOCUST LAKE

 

We were in our green canoes on a chilly lake;

you wore a plaid shirt: orange, green, brown,

autumn on your arms. My skin was warm

in the sun; above us, the tips of the sugar maples

were beginning to burn, the start of the great      

conflagration. We wanted the day to never

end; we knew in our bones that summer

was over. Already it was time for asters,

goldenrod, Joe-Pye weed. The sky ripened

above us, hard and blue. Beneath our paddles,

ripples spread in diminishing circles, barely

perceptible when they reached the rocky shore.  

 

൪

​

As always, when I’m writing I try to capture and pin down a glimpse of life, that three-dimensional experience, and wrestle it onto the page, a two-dimensional form.  And as always, the poem on paper is never quite as good as the poem was in my head.  What keeps me going, I think, is the struggle, that part that’s always out of reach.  I’ll be eighty next year, have never had the opportunity to study with anyone, but I’ve gotten an MFA via the 3000 books of poetry that I’ve read and absorbed. I hate giving a list of who I’m currently reading as I know I’ll be forgetting someone, but here goes: Dorianne Laux, Barbara Hamby, Ellen Bass, Danusha Laméris, David Kirby, George Bilgere, Christopher Buckley, Tony Hoagland, Linda Pastan, Kim Addonizio, Ted Kooser. These are writers whose work I love because of their use of language, sound, and their willingness to engage the reader on an emotional level.  And I read every journal or anthology I appear in, front to back; in fact, twice: once for pleasure and once to study and take notes. I want to remain open, to keep a beginner’s mind, as the Zen practitioners say.  

 

This poem comes out of the space of mourning, having lost my beloved three years ago. For the first time in my writing life, I didn’t write a word for over a year. And then I took the top off my pen (I write in longhand first) and began, ending up with enough poems for a new manuscript.  This one came a bit later, when I was in residency at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, which has also been an important part of my writing life and practice.

​

—Barbara Crooker

​

Barbara Ford

​
 

Interior with Ida in a White Chair

                                    Vilhelm Hammershøi, 1900

 

She is facing the opposite direction.

She is mouthing a tune.

She is fingering a strand of beads.

She is cradling a bruise.

She is mending a tear in her dark dress.

She is staring at a spider climbing the table leg.

She is unfolding a piece of paper.

She is shelling peas into a blue bowl in her lap.

She is knotting a piece of string.

She is spinning two wheels of a child’s toy.

She is examining a splinter in her thumb.

She is sharpening the edge of a letter opener.

She is stilling her hands.

She is listening.

She will, in a moment, twist around to look behind her.

She knows she’s been watched the entire time.

​

൪

​

The day after I turned fifty my steady correspondent of twenty years died from a brief and ravaging illness. Her death unmoored me. Who else was willing to receive my outpourings, who would anchor me in my struggle with incompleteness? Four months later an announcement for a writing group appeared in my mailbox. I signed up.

 

In the compelling cadence of a South African accent, Margaret, our leader, would read a few poems to help us settle before we wrote to the prompts she handed out. To hear words lift off the page and enter my ears was transfixing. She gave us Denise Levertov: She picks a quill, / dips it, begins to write. But not of him. She gave us Lisel Mueller: The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. Wisława Szymborska: The joy of writing. / The power of preserving. / Revenge of a mortal hand. Dorianne Laux: I’m the only one here on my knees. I wanted to be Margaret. I wanted to take words into my body and release them into the atmosphere through the vehicle of my voice. I apprenticed myself to language and began to explore its layers of connective tissue.

 

The regular practice of writing dropped me into the land of poetry, where I found a road and a map. These days I write it, share it, participate in readings and workshops, and delight in seeing my poems in journals and book form. I don’t think anything tops my weekly experience of reading poetry for an hour on the radio, which I have done now for eighteen years. I didn’t become Margaret. I became someone new.

 

Poems quoted: “She and the Muse,” Denise Levertov; “Curriculum Vitae,” Lisel Mueller; “The Joy of Writing,” Wisława Szymborska; “Trying to Raise the Dead,” Dorianne Laux.

​

—Barbara Ford

​

Nancy L. Hausauer

​

​

500 Million Breaths

 

You asked me to shave off the white-blond abundance on your neck

but after just one stripe your electric razor died 

and I had to wing it with scissors, 

cutting as close as I could.  

Watch my ears, you said, as if I wouldn't.

 

*

 

First you were a statue and I was a woman,

then I was a statue and you were a man.

It took us so long to breathe in this place together,

spending our beauty like foolish children along the way.

Now kindness is the currency of our love.

 

We've watched dogs, a cat, a bird,

parents, cousins, friends 

step into the Mystery.

We know what waits for one of us

at the end of love, what waits 

for the other. 

 

We know how quiet and dark

the body seems in death.

You get so used to the tides of breath,    

to the unseen fire, the steady hum of life.

Their absence is so stark,

what you've taken for granted

so clear. 

 

*

 

Mornings are best,    

watching the shadows on the ceiling

arise and pass away

as the sun comes up. And afternoons,

when we are beautiful for each other again

or walk among the trees in slanting light.

Evenings, with our journals on our laps. 

The island you are 

in the ocean of my night.

​

൪

 

When I lie awake at night, or in odd-shaped moments during the day, I often invite dearly loved poems to keep me company. Ogden Nash's "The Octopus," which I learned as a child, still makes me smile. The first stanza of The Canterbury Tales, memorized for an English 101 class, links me to long-ago people and how their mouths shaped our shared language. The Tempest's "Full fathom five" song--so voluptuous! Lorca's "Romance Sonámbulo" saved my life, so it’s always an honored guest. Audre Lorde's "A Litany for Survival" stiffens my spine, Wallace Stevens's "Gubbinal" testifies to the power of imagination and metaphor, Dickinson makes me shiver with delight. So many old friends to savor.

 

I write poetry to claim belonging, however marginal, in this tradition which has so profoundly enriched my life. To participate in the sacred ritual of reading and writing poetry. To perform acts of resistance to the brutally utilitarian ethos of our times. To kick over the traces of logic. And, of course, to express deep, complex feelings that I have no other way to convey--as this love poem to my husband of thirty-two years attempts to do. 

I live in Tacoma, Washington, with my husband and our geriatric cockatiel, on the ancestral lands of the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, under the spell of Tahoma, Mother of Waters.

​

—Nancy L. Hausauer

​

B. Fulton Jennes

​

​

A quarter mile downhill from Our Lady of Tinos, Church of Miracles

 

she crawls up the cobblestoned street, six-foot candle strapped 

to her back, leopard-print dress split at the hips, stockings torn. 

Cars pass in silence. My God, what a shot

 

you say, palming your camera, ready to rise. Don’t I say. 

There’s blood on her knees. Her cheeks streak with sweat, 

mascara. Her coiffed hair unfurls. 

 

We finish our espressos, amble uphill, peer in windows, buy trinkets.

She’s already gone when we arrive at the church. Inside, banks 

of candles blaze, an inferno of atonement.

 

In a cold stone grotto behind the basilica, workers melt half-burnt 

candles in an enormous vat, stir sins out of the molten tallow, 

ladle the purified wax into waiting molds. 

​

൪

 

I’m attracted to miracles. What—you don’t believe? I do. It was a miracle instigated by a priest-friend who died knowing how many years I struggled with infertility, a man who promised to intervene, that finally brought a daughter into our lives. A miracle saved that same daughter from an overdose death, called us silently to her side, hauled the crippled old dog she loved up the stairs to her bedroom to jump on her chest, restarting her breath after my CPR failed. A miracle happens every time I write a poem that seems channeled from the higher power I struggled to believe in during my early days of addiction recovery—another miracle.

 

I’m attracted, too, to other people who’ve experienced miracles—my mother-in-law, who prayed herself free of cancer, the friend whose father met her on the other side after she died and sent her back to finish her work. I’m attracted to places where miracles are known to have happened, like the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec, where crutches and braces sheathe two behemoth columns. And I hope the woman who crawled a quarter-mile uphill on cobblestone to the Church of Miracles on the Greek island of Tinos that day, a six-foot candle strapped to her back, received whatever miracle it was she sought. Seeing her was, in a way, a kind of miracle: evidence that people still believe so fervently despite illness, misfortune, grief.

 

Believe in the miracle of your work, of your life, even of your sorrows. Trust that they are there, waiting to change everything—even if only momentarily in the least-expected of ways.

​

—B. Fulton Jennes

​

Jennifer Judge

​

​

Pierogi Was a Whole Day

 

Flour always smelled better than it tasted.

Square strips of dough, a second layer on top, 

crimped by hand, the worry of it: too thin

and the filling oozed out in boiling water, too thick 

and the pierogi stayed gummy. The stink 

of cooking onion lingered like sorrow for days.

Flour sifted down on linoleum floors, 

that dryness under summer bare feet, the hunger. 

My mother made too many, not out of generosity, 

a kind of cooking martyrdom, the anger, 

the bitterness passed down.  

She pronounced it the Polish way,

never made it plural like her next-generation 

children always did, wore a babushka on cooking days, 

never invited us into the kitchen, always left 

the cleanup for us. It was a fucking mess.

​

൪

 

This poem started from a writing prompt in a state park. The presenter for the workshop asked us to think about family foods, and pierogi was the first thing that came to mind. I think the idea was to get at warm family memories surrounding food, but my piece immediately went to a dark place. Pierogi is a cheap food, but it’s incredibly labor intensive. It’s a heritage food for my family since we are a hodge-podge of various Eastern European ancestry, but it’s a food I hate. This poem immediately brought back the poverty and lack of warmth in my family home. Those warm summer floors dusted with flour always felt as cold as the lukewarm water the pots and pans were soaking in as they awaited clean up. 

​

—Jennifer Judge

​

Crystal Karlberg

​

​

Empty Nest Floor Plan

 

Alarms keep ringing, but I tell myself I don’t know 

what for as I continue to fluff the proverbial pillow 

 

under the dog’s chin. Because she’s all I’ve got. Because 

beer-drunk and scotch-drunk are different, 

 

I am at my most keen as an observer on Friday nights. 

Loquacious is not a word my kids would use to describe me, 

 

but I bet they’d agree that when I drink I talk too much 

and agreement is everything, so it’s fine. It’s all fine. 

 

I’m fine. Even at my most sober I do not understand 

the hammerhead shark in terms of evolution. I admit 

 

we didn’t see any of this coming and that’s where 

eyes on the side of the head would be helpful. 

 

Last week a girl found the tooth of a megalodon, meaning: 

we’ve all been prey this whole time. Overnight the pink 

 

and purple macarons hardened in the fridge because 

we are always thinking about our children in the way they 

 

are always thinking about some other people. People 

they maybe love, people who have birds as pets 

 

or work at zoos. Like tribal tattoos, boundaries exist 

for a reason and I set them, but on fire, 

 

so all I’m left with is smoke and the questions: Why

is the hammer so wide? Why is it so hard to open our eyes?

​

൪

 

I love poems that ask questions outright and/or force me to ask my own questions as I’m reading the poem. I also love poetry that weaves together things you might not normally think would belong together. Everything I experience, through any of my senses, is potential fodder for poetry. This poem was born from the frustration I was feeling as the parent of two twenty-something people. Around that time I saw a video of a hammerhead shark swimming with other kinds of sharks and I started to wonder about the usefulness of the shape of their heads. I revere and am terrified by sharks. Sometimes parenting feels like swimming in shark-infested waters. The question of evolution or why we are the way we are comes up a lot when I think about humans as parents. Writing poems helps me gather my thoughts. And answer questions and of course formulate new questions and thoughts. I have long been a fan of Richard Siken, who creates the most exquisite poems out of seemingly everyday events using language in a way that I can only marvel at. His poems and the poems of Amy Woolard (from her book Neck of the Woods) have given me permissions to gather the seemingly disparate images in my head and weave them into something cohesive that is hopefully interesting and hopefully beautiful. 

​

—Crystal Karlberg

​

Linda Laderman

​

 

In the terminal

 

a sign directs travelers to a reflection room. 

This is not a poem about an epiphany 

I had inside that room. I walked past it. 

 

I was too busy tying my shoes, too busy 

trying to find a coffee bar, too busy scrolling

through my phone to pause and reflect. 

 

At the gate, I watch a young mother nurse her baby,

mesmerized by how deftly she lifts her little boy 

onto her chest. She switches breasts while she talks

on her phone, laughing as she tells the person 

 

on the other end that people are staring, and really

I don’t give one fuck. I mean, where am I supposed

to go? How is it that airports designate relief

spots for dogs, but nothing for nursing mothers?

 

I want to ask her how she found the faith to bring 

a new life into a world that is caught up in chaos. 

What are her worries, her hopes for the future? 

Is she alone? Does she work? Where is she going?

 

She finishes nursing, and brings the baby up to her

shoulder, balancing him with one arm while 

she picks up her backpack. Then, she slides her feet 

into yellow Crocs, secures the child into a cloth sling 

wrapped across her emptied body and walks off. 

​

൪

 

Last fall I was in a writing workshop led by Detroit poet and fiction writer Kelly Fordon. Her workshops are something I look forward to every year. She’s a generous teacher who’s willing to listen to any poem you bring to workshop. And her prompts are consistently thought provoking. When Kelly handed out a list of prompts called “Exploring Faith,” with links to work by poets like Ilya Kaminsky and Ellen Bass, I considered what I would write. I’m Jewish and was a docent for many years at the Holocaust Center near Detroit, but I don’t see myself as a religious person. I struggle when I try to reconcile the state of the world with the premise that God or religion can make a difference. When I saw the sign in the airport pointing to a reflection room, I thought about the prompt again. I got to the gate and found a seat near a young woman with a tiny infant. Watching her, I remembered when I was a young mother. I never would have had the confidence to travel alone—and here was this new mother with torn jeans, a backpack, and yellow Crocs sitting by herself with a hungry baby. Across the terminal was a luxury lounge for first class travelers, and behind us was a group of flight attendants oohing over a passenger’s show dog. Yet, there was no space in sight for nursing mothers. I don’t know exactly why, but seeing her laugh into her phone while she took care of her baby, made me think a bit differently about faith. Maybe I didn’t find it in a place of worship or a reflection room, but for a few minutes, I found a glimmer of it in the terminal.

​

—Linda Laderman

​

Rose Lennard

​

​

She Said We Were Looking For America

 

We made a game of it to start with, sang a song 

about laughing on the bus, and a man whose bowtie 

was a camera, and looking at the scenery.

 

I’d never crossed the tracks before, my hometown tiny

behind us and nothing to snag the wind on its travels 

except a few poles, and wires shivering overhead. 

 

When she said we were having an adventure 

it sounded like a fairytale, and when my legs got tired

she swung me into the cart, on top of the boxes 

 

and plastic bags, and I pretended we had a car, 

imagined the way the wide seats would be slippy 

and have their own smell, and I’d wind the windows 

 

up and down, put my hand out and feel the rushing air 

push it backwards. I must have done that once, and later 

the wipers slip-slopping me to sleep, and the road 

 

all yellow as the headlamps held back the night. 

And already the sun is low in the grey sky, and even 

bundled up like a baby, I start to shiver, and mum says—

 

jump out honey, you’ll warm up if you walk fast,

but I’m hungry and I ask when we’re going home

and she won’t look at me and her bare hands 

 

are gripping the handle of the cart so hard, the bones

in her knuckles are white as an empty cupboard 

and her mouth is suddenly a locked door.

​

൪

 

At school we studied poems by Robert Frost and his easy conversational style and intimacy with the natural world hooked me. Having taken up poetry four decades later, I am constantly amazed and challenged by the beauty, power, vulnerability and insight of many poets. On my bedside table today are volumes by Ross Gay, Fiona Benson, David Clarke and Jacqueline Saphra – just a very small selection of those I find inspirational. I enjoy poetry which doesn’t hide its meaning, which is generous and wants me as a companion. There is so much poetry that leaves me awestruck, that I have little time for poems which seem to want to hide their meaning from me!

 

When we were young, a friend and I once pretended we were going to look for America, inspired by the song by Simon and Garfunkel (we were actually just venturing on a slightly longer walk than usual from our home in Northern Ireland), and it felt romantic and exciting. This poem was written in response to an ekphrastic challenge and the image is much bleaker, and of course this is the reality for many people who find themselves homeless and itinerant, for whatever reason, or for no reason that makes any sense; and often there are children who are caught up in such situations, trying to understand. I find writing to prompts a good way to open up new doors, new territory to explore. 

 

When I am absorbed in writing, when I’m in a state of flow, I just want that to never end.

 

—Rose Lennard

​

Bonita Lini Markowski

​

​

Hollow

 

I was born with a hollow to my bones

that I stuffed with rosary beads and pinewood shavings 

from windows planed with Dad’s own two hands, with the guts

 

of crucified deer and pheasant swinging from our black cherry tree, 

startled faces twisting above puddles of their own stale blood, 

with a balled-up white apron spotted with spaghetti sauce 

 

jammed in the back of an S & H green stamp drawer, 

cardinal feathers that remind me of Mother’s fuzzy red hair,

with chunks of frozen water all dewy-eyed

 

snitched from a wooden icehouse on a dirt road 

after Mass, with wedding confetti in white netting

tied with a bow, the pink so unforgiving no tooth 

 

could crack to the stale almond shrouded inside, 

the Sunday smell of Poppy’s Stogies and Dago red.

Because I know you could never love something

 

so heavy, I empty them, but I dread I will drift

off the earth with nothing to hold me down. Maybe 

I can evolve into a sparrow wearing a black mantilla

 

 I find at the bottom of a Sunday purse.

 

൪

 

For me, poetry has always been necessary. Poems were safe spaces where I could grasp a thread that might tether me to something more stable than my own childhood experience. Early on, I had an affinity for Emily Dickinson and my beloved Aunt Sadie fueled that passion by gifting me a book of her poetry. I’ve always dabbled, but about 6 years ago I finally got the courage to take a serious shot at being a poet. Part of that journey involved earning my MFA. “Hollow” came from a place of longing and never seeming to belong. It’s from the perspective of a speaker who worries that if she gives up all that weighs her down, she would literally disappear. Using the idea of birds whose bones are hollow, I re-imagined this idea of disappearing to one of being able to fly. I often write through memory trying to balance the good ones with the bad. For “Hollow,” I used imagery from my Catholic, Italian American heritage to work through some of the trauma and strive for some sort of balance, but also try to move past that same upbringing. 

​

—Bonita Lini Markowski

​

Mary B. Moore

​

​

To the God of Over

 

Dear embolism to come, shaped 

 

like the loblolly pines I 

 

just drove through; dear nodule, five-armed,

 

lodged by the darling nipple; dear

 

constellation, calcium stars swarming

 

the X-Ray’s night:  I get it. I’m

 

overgrown, a carnival, a bazaar

 

inside a terrarium. You’re over it: 

 

But you’re rife in me too, rumoring another life,

 

or none, while I try to ivy the porch rails,

 

to cling like the purple-flowering vine 

 

that spirals the light pole, 

 

clematis.  Its name begins like clemency.

 

Look: the caduceus is blooming.

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I am a worry-wart. I worry about my husband’s health, and instantaneously see his actual fall on a friend’s steep porch stairs replayed. He’s a tall man; it was like watching a building topple. (He had scrapes but no broken bones.) Contemplating dinner out, I imagine trying on my long double-layered white silk printed with small cobalt flowers in front of a door-length mirror. I think “I don’t deserve this”––what? Beauty, silk, blue flowers? Who knows? The skirt catches fire. 

 

The natural world helps ground or console me. I feel whole as I describe a pin oak’s bark and find language with a little music. Some of my favorite recent and contemporary poets, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Galway Kinnell, Lauren Camp, Lise Goett, Frank Paino, describe their way into meaning. I love the Modernists, and Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Hopkins.  

 

And so, embolism and loblolly: what worry-wart poet traveling in North Carolina and Georgia after being diagnosed with a small breast tumor, which turned out to be benign, could resist that echo’s absurdity, marveling at the pine’s shape, imagining the Rorschach shapes of tumors and blood clots? Dread evokes the Catholic God I don’t quite believe in but love to address. (My last book is Dear If.) I wrote the draft of “To The God Of Over” without realizing, until I revised, that the images’ underlying motive is cancer cells’ run-away growth. Hence, the x-ray’s many stars, the overgrown vegetation. Nothing is “resolved” but when the clematis-caduceus from my neighbor’s yard pops into consciousness, I felt an ease, the exhalation of a deep breath.  Then I found the echo clematis, clemency.

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—Mary B. Moore

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Lisa Righter Sloan

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Halloween, 2023

 

Peek through the blinds.

It’s gone quiet out there,  

no noise at all.  

No shrieks, no keening

of parents; 

Watch for cars! Stay off the road! 

It has been a dark night.  

This must be the end.  

 

The TV whistles: 

orbs arc across a black sky,

lose integrity; 

spatter in brief squalls 

flash like fireflies 

before evaporating 

behind the shadows,

cratering hills, whole buildings;

the landmarks of a place. 

 

Forefront, a light-shocked face 

beneath crooked helmet, 

above a panicky flak jacket.

Mic gripped tight. 

The outfit of unrest. 

The get-up of war. 

This kind of correspondence 

is tough.

 

Still quiet outside, 

no dogs barking, no crickets; 

no cars inching their way home.  

Now it is raining. 

The children have been bundled 

inside, dazed. Unable 

to decide what to keep, 

what to give away.

They unravel bloody 

mummy bandages, fall asleep 

in shredded zombie costumes.  

 

They will wake up 

with tummy aches; throw most of it away.

 

 

Big eyes, barely open eyes,

slide across the screen; 

stare up at the falling sky, 

observe the ceiling as it caves; 

recognize the opalescent inside

of a small, correctly sized, bag.

 

Those who move or can be moved

glide as if on ice or are grasped close 

in crossed arms. Their eyes are oxidized.

Small arms dangle by their sides. 

They are thick with dust;

abandoned items on back shelves.

 

And they are bloodied.

It seeps through the insistent layers

that cling to their bodies, 

their clothes, their lashes.

Through bandages 

caked with the stuff.

In rare stillness 

a glimpse of a narrow pink cuff 

adhered to a limp wrist;

the blue toe of a loose shoe

dangling from a little foot.

 

Everywhere, children look up.

Only somewhere there is a moon.

Somewhere there are stars.

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There’s a phrase that is frequently used that loosely indicates a kind of extra state of being: “I am (or was) beside myself.” The phrase can lead to so many conclusions: “I was beside myself with happiness;” “I am beside myself with anger, with grief, laughter, glee, disbelief, shock, etc.”  So many ways to be beside oneself!  But the generosity, the openness of the phrase got me thinking.  It is this dynamic of the self, the ability to be oneself and yet “beside oneself,” to observe or take stock of the self (or of anything, really), from more than one perspective that is so at the heart of what poetry does for me, and what I strive to honor in my own writing.  

 

To be clear, I don’t like to think of this as a dynamic of duality, i.e., the inner vs outer self, but more of an opening up to the possibility of multiple perspectives, a means by which to craft something that can be shared, something that can be passed on, especially in the world we live in today.  Life swirls around us in such unexpected ways, but we are all in this chaos together and we all bring to it an arsenal of perspectives. We owe it to ourselves to be open to listening, seeing and sharing.  

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—Lisa Righter Sloan

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Heather H. Thomas

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Birthplace

 

​1: father

 

Buried yourself long before

you died. My grief 

dug itself out, 

 

through shards, thinking 

I wouldn’t feel anything. 

I’d never felt a thing for you.

 

After, I bled where you, 

intoxicated, fell on the street,

breaking your arm. 

 

You died alone. 

No one told me 

until my mother 

 

read your obit. Survivor 

unnamed: daughter

dead to you. Wakefulness

 

hurt. I couldn’t breathe.

Viewing your body, 

I said my line, performing

 

the ritual of myself:

You were a fool to leave 

my mother and me.

 

Mother seemed pleased. 

Had we stayed with you, 

she told me once, 

 

we wouldn’t have survived.

 

2:   mother

 

Now you are dead

and my father is dead,

you buried in one green place,

 

he miles away amid statuary.

Looking at the earth, 

no one will know 

 

you knew each other. 

No one will know I was, 

I am, the issue

 

between you. Hinge

of the compass, I will place

the needle on one grave,

 

circling it with the pencil.

Move the needle to the other. 

Draw another circle. 

 

Where the circles intersect,

I will live, each circle

a lung breathing me back.

 

Opening the dark, robin sings. 

Finch nears as I hang the feeder.

On an oak branch, two doves.

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“Birthplace” is a poem of healing and reunion that took a lifetime to write. I had to find my breath and voice, having grown up abandoned by my birth father in an atmosphere cloaked in the language of denial. My silence became shame about my true paternity. I learned that if you do not use language, you are used by it. 

 

I wasn’t fully breathing because I felt unworthy taking up space with my truth. To find my voice I had to breathe differently and become embodied. In quiet moments, I could hear a faint wailing buried within. As I listened, I wrote. Eventually I was making poems. To write oneself into wholehearted being is an ongoing process of discovery. Among poets who inspire me are the late C.D. Wright—“Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life,” and Alice Notley—“Poetry is the performance of the search for the soul.”

 

As I wrote “Birthplace,” the compass image came to me.  Then I recalled Donne’s compass in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”: one foot fixed while the other travels away circling the fixed foot, keeping two separated lovers connected. My compass inscribed two circles intersecting to create a third, boundaried space. Here the speaker can live freed from being the “issue” between her parents, yet in a reunion possible only after both parents are gone. 

 

A poetics of reunion is central to my work following Vortex Street (2018, FutureCycle Press). 

I cherish Rilke, Virginia Woolf, H.D., and Wallace Stevens as literary muses. My recent reading includes Victoria Chang, Mahmoud Darwish, and Valzhyna Mort. Rilke teaches me that it’s not enough to have memories. They must be “changed into our very blood, into glance, and gesture” before the first word of a poem arises from them. 

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—Heather H. Thomas

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Sue Ellen Thompson

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Poolside

 

When I stand with my back to a full-length mirror 

and hold a smaller mirror to my face, 

I see my mother walking away from me 

 

in her bathing suit, the one with shirring 

at the waist. She’s left me and my sisters 

floating on our rafts, while she prepares 

 

a lunch that she will serve us on a tray. I know 

that we should rouse ourselves to help her, 

but we’re too languorous and sun-dazed.

 

She’s in her seventies—16 months

from dying, although none of us

will know that for a while. How lean 

 

and tan her legs are, free

of the dimpling that comes with age.

But the flesh around her waist 

 

has decided it will settle in the place 

where it feels most at home. In this way 

I am both like and unlike her, moving through

 

these years—which may be fewer 

than imagined—in the flesh that has accrued 

to me, but without the luxury of three

 

grown daughters lounging poolside, so sure

of being cared for they just lie there, 

waiting for their sandwiches and beer.

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Family life has always been, and continues to be, my most fruitful subject. Marriage, parenting, the death of loved ones, an adult child’s emerging gender identity: Just when I think I have exhausted these themes, they re-emerge. “Poolside” is a good example. As someone who grew up in a large family and produced a very small one, I often think about what my mother’s life must have been like. She was deeply involved in the lives of her five children and eight grandchildren and was still taking care of us well into our adulthood.

 

The poet to whom I look for inspiration is one who never had children of her own: Jane Kenyon. But her precise and plainspoken diction, along with her gift for imagery and emotional restraint, are the qualities to which I’ve always aspired. In her poem, “Happiness,” she compares this elusive emotion to “the uncle you never / knew about, who flies a single-engine plane / onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes / into town, and inquires at every door/ until he finds you…” Whenever I feel “stuck,” I pull her Collected Poems off the shelf, open it at random, and just start reading. 

 

Because I have taught adult poetry workshops at The Writer’s Center in D.C. for so many years, I am often asked to read my students’ manuscripts before they are published. I recently read Amanda Newell’s first full-length book, Postmortem Say, forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press, and had the same visceral reaction I remember having the first time I read the work of Sharon Olds. So much of the poetry, published or unpublished, that I read nowadays just washes over me. Newell’s poems are still with me.

 

—Sue Ellen Thompson

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Laura Grace Weldon

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Touching The Sun    

 

It starts as cloud-like white rings

around the page I am reading. 

I look up to see coronas circle 

framed photo, lamp, doorway. 

Migraine, I realize,

not long before my vision splits

into shimmered geometrics, a

zigzag of dazzle camouflage. 

 

I close my eyes to wait it out, 

wonder when I might get 

back to all I need to do 

while burgundy light through my lids 

flickers into fractals. This week

the Parker Solar Probe flew between 

the solar wind and the Alfvén critical surface.

This means it touched the sun. 

We touched the sun.

 

Here on Earth I teach classes, type 

Track Change comments on manuscripts, 

decide what to make for supper,

oblivious of our planet’s graceful pirouette, 

its thin blue band of atmosphere 

between all living beings and space.  

We inhabit a tiny blip of time 

near the Milky Way’s edge, 

born from mystery into mystery.

My vision clears. I go back to work. 

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I rely on poetry as a handhold, steadying me to face this beautiful world’s chaos and despair. Some poems sink in so deeply I feel I’m walking with the poets. Their words resound in me. They encourage me to see and feel and wonder and sometimes, through poetry’s alchemy, they help me stand in the presence of the unfathomable. Every night I read poetry before turning out the light. I like to believe those poems infuse my dreams. 

 

—Laura Grace Weldon

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