Lana Hechtman Ayers

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Poetry Never Dies

 

My dear friend Patricia came to visit me yesterday

on the heart-shaped leaf of a hosta in my front yard.

 

She had transformed into a snail 

just as she proposed to do in a long ago poem of hers.

 

A lovely lemon yellow and white striped shell.

I offered my grandma’s silver thimble as alternative

 

but done with such menial labors,

she peacefully glided on by 

 

leaving a shiny trail for the rain

to follow.

 

—for Patricia Fargnoli

 

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My poem “Poetry Never Dies” was written in memory of the brilliant poet Patricia Fargnoli. Pat was a poetry mentor who became a dear, dear friend and my biggest cheerleader. Her long ago poem where she talks about coming back as a snail that I refer to in my poem is called “Reincarnate” and appears in her book Hallowed: New & Selected Poems, Tupelo Press, 2017. She died of a protracted illness in 2021 and I miss her every day. It is so apt that this poem appear in Quartet because, though Pat had been writing for many years, her first book, Necessary Light, which won the May Sarton Award selected by Mary Oliver, was not published until she was in her 60s. Necessary Light, originally published in 1999 is still in print and readily available today. Anyone who knows the fickle world of publishing can attest that having a poetry book remain in print for over 25 years is an astounding accomplishment. Patricia Fargnoli truly is an inspiration for women poets over fifty who may be getting discouraged by the tendency toward youth-centric awards and publications in the literary arena. Women who may be asking themselves, Can my work matter, can it live on? The answer is a resounding Yes! It can, it does, poetry lives on, poetry never dies.

 

—Lana Hechtman Ayers

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Laurel Benjamin

 

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Beyond the Grave 

 

The neurologist skooches over to display my brain 

on the computer screen.           It's my mother's brain, I say, 

a whole hemisphere missing,           because surely 

that would explain the nerve pain. 

 

He squeezes something out of a tube, places his thumbs 

behind my ears. 

                                    I say, This will hurt after.

            I only know a quarter of what he knows 

about nerve endings           but I surrender. 

Don't close my eyes,           stare at the brain scan, 

 

see an overlay I can't explain— 

my mother's scan, not shown to us after her stroke 

but at the second hospital,           like a watercolor. 

            Has someone applied blush 

                                    on the right hemisphere? 

 

My cousin calls me, says, Your mother was happy 

you didn't have children, beyond the grave 

kind of talk I don't need, because 

                                    what did she really mean? 

 

            My mother telling my cousin this, while squeezing 

toothpaste out of a tube while washing dishes 

while counting quarters for the pool locker 

                                                              while on the phone? 

 

My mother described to me her cat grandchildren 

as definitive, 

                        maybe in the same tone as my cousin 

who rambled on until I asked her to stop. 

 

                                                                        My mother, 

            who was an outsider to most things, insider 

to the arts, soldier of capability, warrior of driving down 

chance by planning 

                                     so most things could be predicted 

                                                 in the wide plaid pants she wore. 

 

The brain doctor doesn't hear me,           leans in 

            as if I baked a cake                          he wants a slice, 

as if noting invisible tasks that appeal to him. 

 

                                    Yet 

he doesn't notice           my mother has entered the room 

or someone who looks like her             is leaving 

a trail of ash 

                        over the exam room floor. 

 

                        He can't perceive with his medical training 

the cloak covering the shoulders of the woman, 

swimsuit peeking out, her face pasty with sunscreen 

like a good ghost, goggles around her neck. 

 

            She is dripping wet all over the tiled floor. 

 

Dripping wet all over my body as I sit there 

helpless while the doctor manipulates            the space behind 

my ears, against my skull,                                infiltrating 

                        the nerve endings. 

 

I remember the time when I brought my mother 

to her regular doctor after her stroke, so he could check 

her medication because she would stand up and fall down. 

            He came into the room, took one look. 

Refused her. We'd waited 

                                                 in the little room 

                        half an hour, she fidgety. 

 

            I didn't know changing her medication 

wouldn't fix her brain,                                           half a hemisphere 

wiped out, brain playing a chess game and           a hand brushed 

the pieces off the table, out of the brain. 

 

Then I hear my brain doctor say, 

            Your brain is healthy, shows you've lived a healthy life.

I separate myself from the memory 

to hear him, separate from      my mother-ghost 

in the room, from                    my mother's brain scan. 

 

            My fingers rip out 

the stitches stitching us together. 

 

Wasn't I the hand that swept 

the chess pieces off the table? Wasn't it my fault 

for not calling her back the day of her stroke, out walking, 

tired of her calling, her not listening to me or her doctor? 

I was too busy. 

 

I tell the neurologist, The space behind 

my ears is where I hide things. 

 

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I've gobbled up countless poetry books in recent years, in the process of putting together my own. Also, in critiquing others' manuscripts, I take away techniques and inspiration. In a new manuscript by Shelly Cato, what struck me is how she keeps going beyond the imagined, often to 'places' in parallel ways, against time. Whether a poem is long or compact, she stretches the idea of persona, point of view, some with lush imagery, some leaning more on characters. Her work has taught me to be brave, as well as experiment with page layout which mirrors the topic. 

 

I don't write in a vacuum, but in a community. After taking a few ekphrastic workshops from Lorette C. Luzajic of TheEkphrastic Review, I started an ekphrastic writers’ group on Facebook, where I provide visual prompts weekly, and then the group shares their work, providing minimal feedback and much support. I also write to ekphrastic prompts weekly with a friend, run an April poetry month group with word prompts, and host regular readings for that group. "Beyond the Grave" came out of a "Sunday Poem & Prompt" from a Substack account: "Write a poem involving yourself and a family member being conjoined in some odd way." Well, I take prompts liberally. 

 

While my debut book, Flowers on a Train, takes place over decades, in childhood, wandering the world, in the San Francisco Bay Area, my newer project is focused on my Jewish heritage. From a multi-cultural neighborhood in Richmond, California, where my New Yorker parents moved after they married, to the experience of my ancestors, coming from 1920 Poland of changing borders. Discoveries recently made from a series of letters have expanded what we now know about the hardships they faced in the years before emigrating to "Amerika." 

 

—Laurel Benjamin

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Penny Blackburn

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The Horse Has Broken In and Now He Lives Here

After Emily Berry

 

Clatters in the bathroom while I’m trying to sleep. Blocks the plughole with all that hair. Uses

the best teacups without asking. Breaks them. Turns on the taps and leaves them to overrun.

Unfolds the laundered towels. Eats bacon straight from the fridge. Shits on the lino. Gets

between me and the cooker. A smell of singed horsehair lingers through the summer. Puts his haunches in my face when I’m trying to watch the news. Prefers the radio. Eats all the important

post but leaves the junk mail. Waits until I’ve washed and ironed the curtains then chews them

like clover. Tracks muddy hoofprints over the parquet floor. Kicks at the back door till I open it. Turns his deep dark eye toward me like a question. I shake my head. I cannot follow him out.

 

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I've always had a jumble of words, phrases and images in my head and as a child I wrote lots of stories and poems. After leaving university, I didn't write, but it was all still going on in there and when I went to a local writing group in my late forties, it was like a cork coming out of a bottle. I love being able to run a prompt through the filter of my brain and see what comes out the other side, what nuggets of memory, life, history, learning or strangeness have worked their way into the poem on the page. Much of my poetry has themes of loss or out-of-placeness. I really like poetry that is unsettling or has strange undercurrents and I am currently obsessed with the Robin Robertson poem “At Roane Head” from his fantastic collection The Wrecking Light. It’s the poem I wish I could have written myself. 

 

I have always loved to perform – as a child I wanted to be an actress – and I find immense joy in spoken word events. I ran one for a while in a bar here in North East England and it helped me to connect with so many people across the local poetry community and beyond. Writing is often seen as a solitary activity, but it cannot exist in a bubble. Not only as poets, but as humans, we need to share, connect with and support each other. I’m proud to be able to do that both in person and through the words that I write.

 

—Penny Blackburn

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Sara Burant

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Puddle

 

Let me peel the sky from a puddle, wrap it like an aura around my whole self, the puddle

vanishing more slowly than it came, not falling but rising, vapor i can’t see but feel 

erasing my edges      ippl ur      i ripple i blur

 

*

 

It’s a muddle, is it real, the sky of a puddle, cloud-branches-wires-sun, and some crows cruising

by on their way to other puddles’ skies,      if you’re a puddle you don’t ask why,      things come,

they go,      and you for moment contain them

 

*

 

By night the puddles gleam, lights float and call, call and float, from what world do they come,

eyes of a dream, a dream of eyes,      who watches who waits who calls me by my name

 

*

 

An ambulance blares by, but trouble doesn’t trouble the puddles which go without triage, trauma

or care,      into the air      i breathe with every other living, dying thing

 

*

 

To taste the puddle i catch rain in a glass, add salt for the asphalt, green tea for the grass and

lastly a thread or two of saffron, for the gleam of detachment any puddle might wear

 

*

 

Uddle oosh through the puddle on my bike i whoosh, a plume behind, a road before,      but ume,

but oad, but where am i going,      with whom, and why,      and will the puddle come too

 

*

 

Nightly the biggest puddle is a puddle of big song,      the closed-lip throat-song tree frogs sing, pulsing, pulsing,      heart tucked inside the world’s invisible ribs

 

*

 

Befuddled i walk right through the puddle, it hasn’t shrunk for weeks, it’s practically a country, a history i could read if i could read what lies beneath broken pavement and broken promises, a language of clay and basalt, sediments, fissures, creaks and groans, whispers, nudges, an ancient

ocean

 

*

 

Oom arom in the heart of a puddle i carom,      let the stormy clouds chase everyone from the

place, let the harum-scarum addled world rush by,      the puddle and i in its midst we pause

sloshing, and sing

 

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An ongoing source of inspiration for me: reading poetry journals online and in print and discovering work that’s alive, fresh, compelling, beautiful, and/or challenging, work that leads me toward the heart of another poet’s mind, perceptions, understanding. Many, perhaps most, of us will never be “famous” or gain wide renown as poets, and still we keep engaging with the world through language, and this honestly amazes me. Over and over. I’m grateful for the wealth of online journals which makes it easier to experience contemporary poetry I wouldn’t otherwise have access to. The journals I return to and the ones I happen upon for the first or second time expand my own journey with poetry in profound, perhaps unsayable ways. 

 

I also find joy in poetry by working collaboratively on translation. The attention we pay to each choice, word by word, building poems in English from those in French, inspires my own practice. And last summer I began a deep dive into the work and life of Lorine Niedecker. I, too, am a native of Wisconsin. Though I don’t seek to emulate her work, I feel a kinship with her through our shared experience of history and place. I aspire to achieve a quality of attentiveness kindred to hers. 

 

—Sara Burant

 

Robin Davidson

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CRICKETS ON ASCENSION DAY                        

 

In Florence children hunt crickets in the grass 

            or buy them in cages for a few coins in the market square. 

                         Luck depends on the creature’s singing, 

 

                         the length or height of its leap. Each morning 

             as a child I knelt beneath a portrait of the rising Christ. 

His white robes billowing into the clouds, an assurance 

 

of a world without end.  My mother died in a hospital elevator 

            in spring, with only bed railings to hold her. 

                        For Mother, heaven was Italy, 

 

                         the wines and breads she found in the markets, 

            not those of the Duomo. Her Italy, the paradise of savored youth.    

The Festa del Grillo is medieval. Crickets herald the spring. 

 

They swarm and chew through whole fields of wheat and barley. 

            Crickets bring light and song, then ruin. 

                         The heart too is medieval. My mother 

 

                          sought an ascension, the radiance of a god, 

             or gossamer song. She longed to be weightless, 

lifted by wind, a leap of wings.

 

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I first came to love poems in the spring of 1972 when I was part of a British poetry course at the University of Texas at Austin taught by the poet David Wevill. He was young, handsome, and had a melodic voice. As the low light of early evening shown through the classroom’s windows, he would lean against the old pine desk, smoke cigarette after cigarette, and read aloud from Eliot’s Four Quartets or Pound’s Cantos. I was only 18, but I’ve never forgotten the spell such verse cast upon all of us in the room, and I’ve carried that love of incantatory language and the power of poetry’s music within me since. Now at 72, I know the literary arts’ power to transform our lives, and I’m not sure I would have survived without poetry—its consolation and concomitant healing. I love too many poems and poets to mention here, but perhaps the one poem I turn to most often is Rilke’s “Abend” (“Evening”) from The Book of Images translated from the German by Edward Snow. The closing stanza is for me an ars poetica—

 

                           …and leave you (inexpressibly to untangle)

                           your life afraid and huge and ripening,

                           so that it, now bound in and now embracing,

                           grows alternately stone in you and star.

 

“CRICKETS ON ASCENSION DAY” emerges out of the turbulent postwar era of my birth in the port city of Trieste in 1953 when it was an Independent Territory. My father, as part of the U.S. Judge Advocate General Corps, was the American attorney stationed in an international legal office there. My poem is meant to honor the memory of my mother who carried that time in Trieste within her the remainder of her life—a city of idyllic beauty, the imaginary city of her youth. 

 

—Robin Davidson

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Jessica de Koninck

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Housekeeping

Boredom accumulates like dust
along the door frames, swept

clean for a day or two, but soon begins
to settle again. 

Not boredom. No, anxiety. The dream
of missing the plane, of lost in the terminal,
of can’t get a taxi.

Too stiff to move, to clean, to cook, to get
up from desk.  Stop looking out the window.

A pair of swans looks so clean from here.
I worry about bird flu, even the geese I detest

might die. It is too cold to go out. Too wet.
Too outside.

If I clean the bathroom, I can stay in my
pajamas. If I don’t get dressed I can stay
inside.

What does it matter if we stop minting pennies.
What does it matter if everyone dies.

I’m out of Windex and paper towels.
 

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Sometimes, for me, poetry is a “mind dump,” a place to release the worries and get on with the day-to-day. But the day-to-day also has its own strategies for getting in the way. I find excuses not to write, not to do much of anything. At the same time, my thoughts race along, finding connections between one thing and another. I remind myself to just sit down and write. I write what’s on my mind. The writing may turn into a poem that works. Often it doesn’t. But at least there is something on the page.

 

If I hadn’t become a poet, I might have become a social historian. My poems reflect my interest in history as a vehicle to understand people and the world. I am drawn to poets like Miłosz and Pinsky, for example, who so deftly mine that terrain. Poetry creates space to explore the inconsistent and the incongruous.

 

I’ve been writing poems for decades, but did not start writing seriously until I was in my late ’30s or early ’40s. My husband’s death, more than two decades ago, crystallized my themes. But my writing has also changed quite a bit over the years. I’m interested in how the poem finds its form, but I am not interested in poems that are obscure for their own sake. I’m the author of two collections Repairs (Finishing Line Press) and Cutting Room (Terrapin Books). For more, www.jessicadekoninck.com

 

—Jessica de Koninck

 

Christine Jones 

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The Summer My Mother Went Back to Work and My Big Brother Turned Thirteen

 

Below my right third knuckle a narrowing scar brands me like the hot-iron 

on sheared cattle. Doesn’t let me forget his existence. In the kitchen, one summer, 

the skillet, grilled cheese. Two layers of Kraft American. I trusted my brother when 

he said hey sis, show me your hand. Would the spade-shaped hole of the spatula singe? 

Didn’t flinch until the skin seared. I yelped, hurled the lemonade pitcher, slipped 

on the red-brick linoleum. Smashed glass & speedy fists. A mess we cleaned before 

Mom came home. To this day, if she found out, I don’t know. Don’t know if she knew 

he always folded the wooden attic steps to shut me in. Chased me with a steak knife. 

Hid under my bed at night. Scared the life out of me. Did she know he yanked my first necklace 

from my neck. Pretend pearls rolling under the kitchen table. Did she know 

it was me who forgot those scissors on the chair where he sat? Stitches kept him from swimming. 

I didn’t mean it. I cried. Missed my big brother from summers before, the games we played, 

the Aesop’s Fables he read. Is he the serpent, or am I?  To this day, I hate the dark. 

Those attic steps closed tight. My scar though faded still bright.

 

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Two prevalent themes in my poetry are the ocean and my mother, but occasionally, my brother rears his head as if he’s still pretending to be the boogeyman under my bed. The poem “The Summer My Mother Went Back to Work and My Brother Turned Thirteen” came from a prompt to write about a scar, and this poem tumbled forward with all its sensory detail. I can still smell the grilled cheese and feel the stickiness of the lemonade. That summer is vivid in my mind and one that foreshadowed where our relationship would go. He was my best friend and protector for the first ten years of my life. That summer he turned thirteen was the beginning of the end. Our relationship is estranged now and while I’ve come to settle upon some form of radical acceptance, the fact he still pops up in my poetry reminds me that I do indeed miss him. It reminds me of a poem I once read by George Eliot titled “Brother and Sister.” Eliot references the bittersweet recollections of a happy childhood, which she realizes is irrecoverable and writes in this eleven-section poem of her anguish that she “never found again / That childish world where our two spirits mingled.”

 

—Christine Jones

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Margaret Anne Kean

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DCIS Grade 3 :: To Feel My Body Again      

        after Daniella Toosie-Watson after Ross Gay after Gwendolyn Brooks

 

Removing shoes and socks, I go in search of earth, 

to feel my body again. 

I want my feet to be like the mole’s persistent paws 

happily burrowing into damp, dark dirt, 

returning to their first sense of home.  

 

Red-breasted wrens dart across my view,  

crows call out to each other,  

and, flitting among the Japanese elms,  

green-feathered lesser finches,  

no bigger than a hummingbird.  

 

Each one back from wherever they hid  

during three days of torrential rain. 

Worms, drowned in the downpour,  

lay scattered on the driveway and porch,  

their carcasses baking in the sun.  

 

Today, the last drain from surgery was removed  

and no belt holds dripping liquid. Nothing

measures output. I have no bloody tubes

to hide under my clothes.  

All my excesses are absorbed.

 

Like red bricks that lay side by side  

in the cement driveway, my incisions cross 

under the breast, the arm, and up onto the back.  

Evidence that something significant  

happened here. Mostly hidden by soft clothes.  

 

And isn’t that what I do, daily? Hide imperfections, 

the evidence of suffering, even from myself. 

Sometimes I forget the gift of the body: 

all the ways it shows how far I’ve come, 

the stories I can tell, what I have survived. 

  

Raising my arm just enough, 

I review the incision in the reflection of the mirror. 

Let my fingertips caress the skin, 

its bumps and bruises.

Listen: there is only room for resilience here: 

 

like the baby lizard on the threshold, 

completely covered in sunlight, 

three narcissus emerging out of dirt  

to lay yellow trumpet heads against the cement wall,

tiny gnats swirling in sunbeams between trees.  

 

In front of me, the Safari Sunset rises:  

its reddish leaves cup large seed pods,  

its branches lift toward the sky: defy

gravity. Two scabs on my side 

begin to itch. 

 

൪

 

I came to poetry later in life. After nearly a decade of reading voraciously, attending workshops, and completing an MFA during the pandemic, I am newly retired and thrilled to continue my poetry journey full-time.

 

What I love about poetry is that it gives creative voice to the deep feelings and experiences we share. Reading Patricia Smith’s tankas in Blood Dazzler opened a whole world to me, and I felt profound grief in just five lines. I read Mary Oliver's poem "The Ponds" and knew my imperfections were acknowledged and accepted. Jane Kenyon's "Walking Alone in Late Winter" captured the complexity of relationships. As a former choral singer, I am still stunned, and find myself holding my breath, while reading W.S. Merwin's "Weinrich's Hand." And as I grow older, I am moved deeply by Merwin's "Dew Light." I want my own writing to move someone as I’ve been moved.

 

As a recent breast cancer survivor, my writing currently explores that experience. I also write about the beauty of the natural world and how the bees, butterflies, mockingbirds, and crows of my neighborhood demonstrate resilience, tenacity and grace. I continue to be interested in how we each choose to see and interact with our memories, our extended community as well as the natural and global world.  

 

I’m currently reading This Is the Honey, an anthology of black poets edited by Kwame Alexander which is filled with deep, rich work, and just finished Leila Chatti’s Deluge, and Joan Kwon Glass’s Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms. I’ve also become obsessed with James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line and Ellen Bryant Voigt’s The Art of Syntax. My eighth-grade self would never believe my current excitement about grammar and the interplay between line and syntax.

 

—Margaret Anne Kean

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Miriam Krasno

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As I Buttoned My Blouse This Morning

            Thanks to Annie Dillard

​

The sinew pulled from the caribou’s back

hangs over the fire to dry.

Later, frayed and twisted, this thin tendon

binds the garment tighter.

In heaviest winter

the hunters will suck these shirt threads

for scraps of fat

to heat their bodies and blood.

 

The muscle dries

as the women stalk the birds.

Hours of silent pursuit.

Three are snared 

and bone needles pierce the beaks.

Cord lacing their bills, 

the birds flap and fly, living kites

to attract their kin.

How easily a flock is netted.

 

The mothers return to the fire with their catch.

Bird skin and body clutter the ground

as long threads of sinew

are pulled through the flesh.

Thousands of stitches are sewn to join

the human, the feather, the skin and the beast.

 

൪

 

I don’t think I even knew what poetry was until fourth grade when my teacher introduced haiku to the class. I loved the form and, if I’m remembering correctly, I authored a very good haiku. It described the winds of spring and the sudden flight of the hat I was wearing. Not bad for a 10-year-old. No, I don’t remember it, but take my word for it, it set me on my path as a writer.

            

My next influence was the book Harriet the Spy. I related to her “otherness” and her spunk. I started keeping a journal of sorts, like Harriet, and just kept writing journals for years. I take long breaks between writing jags; some have been as long as 15 years, depending on what has gone on in my professional life. I’ve spent time in trade publishing as an editor, but currently I work as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker specializing in grief work and geriatric challenges. I consider the writing breaks as a time when my brain unconsciously collected material for my undercover poet/essayist profession.

            

I love Annie Dillard’s work, especially Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which inspired this poem. My poems begin percolating when I spot an unusual visual image or action. I’ve written about how tombstones and mailboxes have the same shape, what it sounded and looked like when a roller coaster carriage broke loose and sailed over the Chicago River and crashed, and what a covered bridge must look like to a horse riding through. Mostly I find that the relationship between angels, animals, and humans is my underlying theme, and my poems reflect that connection in unexpected ways.

            

I read Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich and Ruth Whitman — women I respect and who inspire me. I am a totally self-taught poet, so I will happily listen to suggestions of other poets to study. To the Quartet editors, I am grateful that you published my tribute to a great author’s work. 

 

—Miriam Krasno

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Stacy R. Nigliazzo

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Clinic Diary

           Off shift

 

The ghosts that follow  

 

                                                  gather at my kitchen table for tea most mornings 

             

                          or whenever I leave the kettle out      They have no need of television or clocks 

 

and pour the honey slowly      stirring 

                                                                           softly               They come

 

                            slipping the black door of my eyes 

 

                                                     I couldn’t make them breathe, but I tried       and would again

 

I tell them                     and they believe

 

            When the little ones cry the bigger ones braid sunlight into swaddling blankets

 

                                                                                                    The mothers-to-be sing lullabies

 

My dogs no longer rise when the old man with the billiard pipe       bends 

 

                                                               to cover my bare shoulders 

                                                                                                                                          as I sleep

 

൪

 

I am a nurse who loves words. I have worked twenty-six years in clinics and hospitals, and my whole life as a poet. I currently serve as faculty at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where I teach poetry and art to students and physicians.

 

This is my life’s work.            

 

I seek to acknowledge and elucidate the body of the earth and the earth of the body, both of which I hold sacred. 

 

A footprint in the dirt is a prayer, just as breath is a prayer. 

 

And all hospitals are haunted houses – every caregiver knows this. To quote the poem “Faith Healing” by Rafael Campo: “The tiny silver crucifix she wore / enacted what it seemed we did to her / …the dead moved quietly around the room, unseen / …Dear Lord, I said, / attempting what I thought was prayer, / …forgive me for not healing them.”

 

—Stacy R. Nigliazzo

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Kathleen Diane Nolan

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World Book

 

One year my sister became magical and brave.

She rose from her bed at midnight, 

gliding across the floor in a white nightdress

 

holding a map she drew in crayon on a paper bag. 

Creeping into corners and cabinets, she unearthed 

the bottles from our father’s hiding places,

 

lining them up like prizes on the kitchen table

for morning. Bottles of bourbon and rye, jugs filled 

with wine as purple as the plums we ate all summer, 

 

the fifth of Gordon’s Gin she found stashed behind 

our lone encyclopedia. My sister sat until dawn with that book 

on her lap, reading about aardvarks and archaeology, 

 

about architecture and Jane Austen, tracing the words 

with her finger. That was the year my father stopped 

speaking to my sister, the year she grew 

 

smart and tall, the year she wrote a report on the Battle of Antietam 

and made a model of an atom out of clay. 

The nucleus was blue. 

 

൪

 

I read and write poetry for beauty, for shelter, for communion and for discovery. Entering a poem is the way I quiet down and meet the present moment. Poems are my islands, my touchstones. 

 

As a hospice social worker, I am drawn to poetry that explores the indefinable experience of grief, loss and bereavement. Ellen Bass is a poet whose work I continue to return to, a poet who captures the weight of sorrow in her beautiful poem “The Thing Is”: 

 

                                                you think, How can a body withstand this?

                                                Then you hold life like a face

                                                between your palms, a plain face,

                                                no charming smile, no violet eyes,

                                                and you say, yes, I will take you

                                                I will love you, again.

 

—Kathleen Diane Nolan

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Vivian Faith Prescott

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Girl-Feet at the Ocean’s Edge 

 

Today, we are barefoot

and collecting clamshells

 

to dry and paint with 

watercolors and blue inks.

 

Our toes are water-wrapped 

in sea, and the bite of this rainday 

 

offers us delight. Did I mention 

we three sisters are old girls,

 

rag-eyed and sea-weed haired? 

These are our salt-years. 

 

Our gaits are bird-strange 

like a small flock of sanderlings.

 

All morning long, we’ve 

beachcombed until we’re noondrunk 

 

with ideas of lunch and naps.

But as the shells dry 

 

on my porch rail,

we think in girl-thoughts— 

 

landscapes brushed 

on the undersides of seashells, 

 

faraway lands to be held someday

in the palms of our hands. 

 

൪

 

I come from generations of storytellers and poetry is the medium I often use to tell our stories. I wrote my first poem at eleven years old to express grief. By the time I was in high school I was known for being a poet and was paid $5 a poem to write romantic angst for my teenage friends (More than I typically get paid now!). 

 

I quit high school in tenth grade to marry a young fisherman and start a family. There was no college on our small island (still isn’t) so I taught myself how to write bad poetry and then it became better poetry and now I’m pretty good at it except for composing sonnets. I received an MFA in poetry because the University of Alaska finally implemented a low residency program (defunct now).  

 

The rural Alaskan island life is featured in my writing. The island I’m living on is shaped like a snow-goose flying to the Stikine River flats—Kaachx̱ana.áakʼw. I was born and raised on this island in Lingít Aaní, also called the Tongass National Forest. My children’s and grandchildren’s ancestors have been here on this land for more than ten thousand years. 

 

This small forested and boggy island is all I know, and it sustains me and my family at our fishcamp along the Inside Passage of the Alexander Archipelago. My poem “Girl-Feet at the Ocean’s Edge” is about growing old on the island. Besides writing, I harvest our island’s traditional foods from the land and sea for distribution to our tribal citizens and local elders. If I’m not writing you can find me in the salmonberry bushes, or on the beach tasting seaweed, and maybe out on our boat jigging up a halibut. I always bring a notebook with me. 

 

—Vivian Faith Prescott

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Irene Sherlock

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​

Hopper Exhibit 

 

We moved with others through crowded rooms, 

getting close when space allowed to study 

his watercolors, oil on canvas. 

 

Both of us long single, mostly content 

in our familiar neighborhoods. 

My yellow sofa and scratched mailbox. 

 

Your vintage lamp and cracked chimney. 

For years, I was the woman in a cafeteria 

looking down at her hands. 

 

You, the man in his office gazing 

out the window. Perspective, we decided 

about the artist’s vision,

 

his slant on those living inside 

buildings, seen through windows, 

unaware, glancing away. Often alone. 

 

And his saturated rooftops, bright or muted 

as we walked and sometimes touched each other. 

Look.

 

Now, this morning in bed, we gaze down, seeing: 

Your knee. My toe. 

Look.

 

൪

 

I find it hard to write about love—the way we love, the way we’ve been loved. I’ve always been drawn to Hopper’s work, how people in his paintings often seem together, yet apart. Or, maybe that’s what I’m projecting. Walking with the crowds at the Whitney Museum, I better understood what Hopper seems to have known. We humans sometime have competing needs for closeness and distance, independence and dependence—and these impulses can rub up against each other through the course of our lives. 

 

—Irene Sherlock

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Christine Sikorski

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​

SHE WROTE IN DARKNESS

(after a poem of the same name by Adam Zagajewski)

 

She wrote in darkness during the years the president 

fired workers, closed offices, held universities hostage, 

outlawed children who checked the wrong boxes. 

 

She wrote in darkness as he canceled research into diseases 

and cures, banned the study of weather, deported people 

for having brown skin, tattoos, opinions. She wrote as he 

 

surveilled people’s wombs, snatched from veterans the doctors 

and nurses they trusted, tore from people across the ocean

the food, medicine, protection we had once freely given. 

 

She built, night after night, a testament to what he had broken. 

 

In the mornings, she carried her words outdoors and embraced

her neighbors. Together, they fashioned her pages into butterflies, 

fastened them to lamp posts up and down the long streets. 

 

This, too, she wrote about—the way people in those years found 

each other, drew close, made new things. Generated their own light. 

 

൪

 

I often return to the poems of Adam Zagajewski. In both “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” and

“To Go to Lvov,” Zagajewski counsels his readers to love the world while looking directly at both its beauty and its brokenness. Recently, I discovered a poem I had written nearly 20 years ago in response to his “She Wrote in Darkness.” While Zagajewski wrote his poem to honor Nelly Sachs, who wrote in darkness so as not to disturb her sick mother, I wrote mine to honor all women who spend their days serving others, reserving nights to commune with their muses. However, when I decided to revise that 20-year-old poem, I found it taking a new direction—given that “light” and “darkness” have taken on new meaning for me since the last U.S. presidential election. I wrote draft after draft, attempting not only to set forth clearly what is happening in the U.S., but to find a way to prevent the darkness of authoritarianism from having the last word. Eventually, my neighbors made their way into the poem, and it began to take form. In my neighborhood, some people have made a project of pinning encouraging quotes on all the light poles, surrounding the words with swarms of bright origami butterflies. Also, neighbors have banded together to plant trans flags in our yards, attend town halls and protests, make and distribute a zine, and participate in Resistance Lab 101 training. We recently had a block party that included children and adults drawing pictures of “what the world needs more of” and strung the drawings on yarn between trees. We are opting not to despair but to create and, in Zagajewski’s words (translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh), to “praise the mutilated world.”

 

—Christine Sikorski

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Sarah Dickenson Snyder

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​

Landing on the Moon

​

Does the moth mistake 

the outdoor light for the moon? 

 

Some mistake the finger pointing to the moon 

for the moon, that dark rock tethered to us 

 

and draws our tides, our blood. 

How my mother seems tied 

 

by some invisible force, in death 

a dull humming as if I’ve slipped 

 

into her wrinkled skin, let her ghost roost 

with a rush of wind unseeable but heard,

 

the moon above silently orbiting 

lit only by the sun, no star 

 

at its core just dust turning 

through space, knitted to me

 

like a shadow. Like a haunting. 

Like breath.

 

൪

 

My mother’s entrance into this poem surprised me. I’m always looking for ways to uncover what I didn’t know I knew, using prompts or methods that engender surprise. A new thing I’m a bit obsessed with is reading and writing Golden Shovels (though “Landing on the Moon” is not one). It’s a bit paradoxical how structure or a couple of guardrails can enhance creativity. I love the puzzling that happens with a Golden Shovel—writing toward someone else’s words. A friend’s Golden Shovels inspired me to right align mine so that the other poet’s words are clearly listed down the margin. Because I’m often moved by Lucille Clifton’s work, I have created several Golden Shovels from her shorter poems. It feels like a way to enter her words with reverence and admiration. And I guess I chase surprise.

 

—Sarah Dickenson Snyder

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Lisa St. John

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​​​

Your Death Made Me

​​​

an estuary, an inlet 

of grief; 

freshwater mixing

with salt.

 

I used to be a puddle,

dried up in sunlight,

only to become

mud again.

 

I wanted to be a lake

for so long.

Placid, but crazy 

with loons.

 

Together, we
were an ocean.

Endless waves, deeper 

than thought.

 

I carve

a canyon, create

arroyos like long

graves.

 

On misted nights

when wind carries

me, I am rain.
I can rain, still.

 

൪

 

My book of poetry, Swallowing Stones, chronicles the movement of my life from love through the loss of my husband, toward solace in grief. I have also written a memoir about this journey. It is currently looking for a home. My latest book of poetry, currently in progress, is about our relationship to science, nature, and magic. 

 

I am indebted to the muse, the unknown, the unimaginable, creative force. I go to work, and if she joins me, wonderful things happen. 

 

Poets I admire include Margaret Atwood, Patricia Smith, Annie Finch, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kwame Dawes, Terrance Hayes, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Joy Harjo.

 

I find warmth in the cold world, beauty in horror. I revel in the traditional form and take risks in experimental visions. Visual art is my forever muse, and I never tire of writing about the power of art. My poems are as much a part of me as my skin, scars, and all.

 

—Lisa St. John

​​​​

Anna M. Warrock

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​

And the Helmet-Maker

            after Osip Mandelstam

 

 

A hard night. The helmet-maker’s wife staring

from her pose on that anvil, boney arms, breasts

nipples on empty sacks, head down. She scents

my breasts, clutch of flesh in my lover’s hands. When

 

I saw her, at 17, I thought Rodin forged into her 

a radiance, angled arm, splayed hand, bent knee, 

and that he had abandoned perfection of the kiss, though— 

and I came to this—how close she is to death. My mother 

 

died one year before, the same thin arms, swollen belly,

diseased. What is dying for—recoil relentless, 

to sag without form, never Helen’s story, but women’s,

and on the hymn of art, I was the beautiful, was. 

 

൪

 

I fell in love with Rodin in my high school art class, his romanticism, his gestures beyond the realistic that convey so much. “….Once-Beautiful Wife,” reputedly a former courtesan, also appears on Rodin’s monumental Gates of Hell, interpreting Dante with a memento mori of women’s “condition.” Visuals have always stimulated me, a feeling perhaps inherited from my mother, who, although raised in rural Ohio, brought her three grade-school daughters to museums, visiting New York City’s Museum of Modern Art way before suburban school trips. These were our girls’ adventures. 

 

She gave me a Robert Frost collection when I was 11, and I memorized “Acquainted with the Night,” because I saw that poetry could reveal unspoken sorrow. A high school English teacher encouraged me to write a report on Wallace Stevens, which challenged me to constantly rework my views of reality. As a graduation gift, that teacher gave me John Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, and later reading his Dream Songs stretched me again. Then Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Denise Levertov opened more truths told through new forms and content.

 

I like to read work by non-English-speaking writers, particularly European and Chinese poets, who are often more experimental and inventive than my own work. Thankfully several presses specialize in translations, and through these authors I can hear wide-ranging possibilities. When not reading poetry I read nonfiction, often archaeology and general science. This is a big world, and constantly amazing. In the Northeast, spring turns barren earth to overwhelming green. How does that happen? 

 

—Anna M. Warrock

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Beth Oast Williams

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They Resemble Bones                                                                        

                                                                                                                                                

I wade through the river's eclipse                                           

of washed up cigarettes,                                                         

 

step over drinking straws 

disguised as reeds. I retrieve

 

a broken doll, her eyes wide.

This yard, so torn by the storm.

 

I don't think the remnants of potted

plants know they resemble bones.

 

The pine tree’s clipped limbs, sudden

endings where something old should bend,

 

an arm meant to hold a swing, just gone.

Left are a series of circles

 

as if drawn by a child's first pen.

Look at the tracks where I've been, 

 

treading through a winter yard. 

The aftermath of an angry river clearing 

 

its throat. Wind chimes ripped

and limp in the dirt.

 

൪

 

I have spent most of my life living near the Elizabeth River in Virginia and most of my poems bring me back to that landscape. “They Resemble Bones” is a prime example, as it began as a political poem and finished as one that seems to be totally about nature. It is true that certain things tug on us for attention, no matter what we try to write about. 

 

Among the many contemporary poets who inspire me, I must give a shout out to Jenny George. I discovered her writing recently in a class led by Tyler Mills. George’s book, After Image, is one of those I wish I could say I wrote, and her poem, “Black Butterflies,” is one that will continue to stop my heart.

 

—Beth Oast Williams

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