Cristina Adams

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How to flee your country (1960)

 

 

I. Plan

 

Be deliberate when choosing your shoes. 

Dust off the most comfortable pair in your closet. 

Vogue magazine calls them Cuban heels. 

Here, everyone calls them tacones. 

Here, on your island, a husband might get a taconazo

for flirting with the widow next door.

 

Hollow out the heels, fill them with jewelry – 

mami’s wedding ring, a First Communion charm 

bracelet, diamond earrings from the Ramon Grau years, 

a pearl necklace – anything that could stir yearning,

that could be stolen, melted down, sold, worn by a stranger. 

 

The not-so-secret police will search, seize, discard or divide, 

whatever strokes their pleasure whenever the urge strikes. 

You are as sure of this as the sun rising hot and high.

 

II. Prepare

 

Before collecting your travel permit, cover your fury 

with cosmetics and a smile. 

Pay special attention to the shadows 

under your eyes; give nothing away, not a single 

briny tear or tremulous syllable. 

 

Draw a boundary line around your lips; apply 

the reddest red in your vanity. 

Red as ripe tomatoes. 

Red as blood exposed to oxygen. 

Red as the rage that dwells in your dreams. 

Remember to draw your eyebrows, leaving one 

arched in unspoken judgment.

 

A dagger-faced compañero, drunk on his teaspoon 

of power, refuses your husband a visa. 

No reason or exception, not even for your daughter’s wedding. 

He smirks at your surprise, stabs a finger 

at the next supplicant in line.

You want to scream, ¡Hijo de puta!

You want to gouge out his eyes with a paper clip.

Don’t.

Cinch your lips, bury your consonants 

and vowels deep in your bones. 

Order them to hibernate.

 

III. Execute

 

Book a round-trip ticket to Rochester; 

ignore your husband’s oblique warning 

about an open return. 

Watch him twist the points of his mustache

the way Greeks finger their worry beads.

 

Listen as he calls you niña, speaks in code,

leaves your imagination frantic to fill in the future.

Send him an assassin’s glare. 

Use your perfect, penciled eyebrows 

to chase him from the room.

 

Allow yourself to cry.

 

Pack a coat, gloves, the lambswool hat

your husband brought you from Moscow

three dictators ago.

Remember to take your azabache pendant.

You can’t have too much insurance against the evil eye. 

 

At the airport, keep the buen viaje short, 

bittersweet. Tell him you’ll be back soon. 

Say it twice, or you might not go.

Ask Yemayá to protect him.

 

Once airborne, press your face to the window.

See your Miramar neighborhood; see the beach in Varadero, 

a row of royal palms standing vigil.

Keep watching until the plane banks north

over a vast plain of whitecaps.

 

Now…close your eyes.

Pretend you are not going into exile.

Anything could happen while you’re away. 

Anything already has. 

​

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As the daughter of a Cuban immigrant, I grew up bilingual, bicultural and all too aware of a life I might have had if my mother and her family hadn’t been forced to flee their country. Not surprisingly, the notions of exile and displacement figure prominently in my poetry, albeit through various lenses (grief, heartache, rage, loss, regret). 

 

Two poets I’ve been reading for inspiration and example are Leslie Sainz, also the daughter of Cuban immigrants, and Victoria Chang. Sainz’s collection, Have You Been Long Enough at Table, examines the Cuban experience, both imagined and real, from a feminine perspective, while Chang’s book, Barbie Chang, tells a story in poems of a woman’s efforts – alternatively funny and heartbreaking – to fit in with a “ladies-who-lunch mom crowd” that won’t necessarily have her. 

 

“How to flee your country (1960)” is one poem in a collection based on my family’s history and experiences. I want to tell their story through poems that also weave in Cuban folklore, myths and superstitions. Perhaps more importantly, I want to tell a more complete story of Cuba – not just the all-too-common tale of devastation by revolution/politics, but also that of joy, humor, hope and endurance.

 

—Cristina Adams

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Sheri Flowers Anderson

 

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Birthmark

 

What happened to your face?

 

This question from a stranger in a store,

drawn like a mosquito to nakedness,

 

toward the lightened shade 

of a mark at inception, shaped like some  

 

mapped continent on my brown skin,

my left cheek, face-forward 

 

for public consumption, conquest. 

Rebellion and revolution, embarrassment

 

and shame flushes through muscle, 

flinching momentarily into unbelonging,

 

into the timid teenager me decades ago, into 

a steamy wave of self-consciousness 

 

about the texture of skin and life, about the agony 

of love demanded each day to face the world.

​

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The start of this poem was an actual event in the checkout line at a supermarket. I remember mumbling a response, but was so affected by this young woman’s boldness that I immediately tried to write a poem about it. However, it took about three or four years and several revisions to get to the essence of what I call the final version. While much of my work is around memory or the ordinary day-to-day, a prominent theme I notice is connection and disconnection—with others, with myself, with God, with nature and the world.

 

I’ve written since middle school, but had something close to a spiritual awakening after I discovered Nikki Giovanni’s poems in college. I found her work accessible compared to poems I’d been exposed to in high school English.

 

Writing was--and is--my way of understanding things, sorting things out, or documenting my confusion. I continued to write—off and on—in the fringes of my day-job-turned-career and family. But with my retirement from civil service (yay!), I now have the luxury to focus more on learning my craft. There’s so much to learn—about myself mostly—and so much poetry to read and dive into.

 

I’m reading widely and broadly now that I have more time to do so. I’m slowly building a poetry love list, which currently includes (but is not limited to) Mary Oliver, Clint Smith, Rita Dove, Naomi Long Madgett, Charles Bukowski, Ada Limón, Naomi Shihab Nye and Cyrus Cassells. So many poems, so little time…

 

—Sheri Flowers Anderson

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Miriam Bat-Ami

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I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles

(“I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” written by John Kellette (music) with lyrics by Jaan Kenbrovin, 1919)

 

In our fish-skins, thin skins,

our finely colored rainbow trout skins,

we believed that anything was possible,

and everything was probably something else,

something more.

 

We were children of the fifties.

Perry Como sang our tune,

and falling down from moon-swing skies,

angels starred within our dreams.

We knew nothing of the word, survive.

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In our journeys through the countryside outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, my dad would begin singing what had become our traveling song, “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” We all joined in. The song sounded merry. Doris Day sang it, and there we were driving past this luminous coal dump that we called “Egg Mountain” because of its smell.  Soon we’d be at Montdale Dairy, the most delicious homemade ice cream shop. We’d pump clear water from a country well. As a child, I didn’t realize the irony. “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” is about dreams fading and fortunes hiding. We were passing abandoned mines and getting clear water because of mine flooding and water contamination. Yet we sang happily. 

 

The poetry I love often celebrates nature and growth through struggle. There is Mary Oliver’s snake whose old skin splits, and still, bleeding, he inches forward. Elizabeth Bishop’s fish in “The Fish” has numerous hooks embedded in his skin. He’s a testament to survival. Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” imbued me with hope as did H.E.R.’s lyrical song “The Journey” which I recently discovered and played over and over again.

 

Poetry was my teenage revolutionary song about change. In my early twenties, I joined a group of women writers under the direction of Ellen Bass. We explored female empowerment.  Denise Levertov and Diane Wakoski gave me strength. I kept shedding skin.

 

Now I am stretching in all kinds of ways. I explore nonfiction nature writing and the memoir with poetry as the bass line that keeps everything in rhythm. The present shimmers.  When I despair, when sadness overcomes me and I wonder about the future, I think of my five grandchildren and what they will do for change and growth. 

 

—Miriam Bat-Ami

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Mary Clare Casey

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Secrets of Praying Mantis Morphology

 

At the wildlife refuge, we cross paths.

Your alien eyes search for movement,

mine for the wonders of you,

who balances an elongated body,

and membranous wings—ghostly thin. 

My eyes follow your track.

 

When I was younger, I watched a mantis

swivel its thorax, snatch a yellow jacket 

between its forelegs, sharp with spines.

I stood in silence, not understanding

its formidable delicacy was anything

but harmless. I was someone who found

comfort in summer’s pungent odor

of swamp, the piercing crack of lightning.

 

If I could turn my head—quick 

as the mantis—I would watch Death

when it comes for me. Hold it

as I would a jewel. My life 

shimmering in the gloaming 

My hands readied in prayer. 

 

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Words have offered me “voice” for as long as I can remember. I wrote my first poem in second grade. It was about a snowman and was published on a school Spirit Duplicator (Ditto) machine. But it was in college that I truly understood the beauty, complexity and power of poetry. The words of Emily Dickinson forced me to appreciate the complexity of words while the poems of Anne Sexton allowed me to embrace the rawness of words. 

 

Time passed and I joined many poetry groups where I was inspired and driven to improve my writing. I grew to love Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, and Seamus Heaney. As a high school English teacher, each year I read to my graduating seniors Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” emphasizing her lines: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”  —urging them to embrace poetry throughout life. Students inspired me to want them to fall in love with words. 

 

Like Oliver, nature is my muse as well as my companion; it is where I return again and again to find solace, understanding and clarity. Poetry can be a lonely endeavor, but it can also provide company in times when even I am unsure of what it is I feel. It is magical in this way. With poems, I can bring back those I love and miss, make sense of the sometimes senseless, and give praise to the world around me. 

 

—Mary Clare Casey

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Susan Cohen

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​

To Raise a Son

 

In a photo another mother sent me, three men. 

One, my son. The others, boys I knew once

as his friends, all handsome as wolves now.

Whiskers like smoke around their chins, 

mouths crowded with canines and smiles

straining to look easy. I see the muscle

at their jaws, their eyes no longer moonlit 

with wonder. I can’t help myself, I picture 

these un-boys, including my own 

complicated son, with the un-girls 

from their childhoods—women grown

into their lotus bodies, their cumulus breasts. 

And I hope each man recalls the sweetness 

his mother fed him. That some dollop lingers 

on those quick and hungry tongues.

​

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I was struck a few years ago when someone sent me a photograph of my son at the wedding of one of his former high school friends. Three men in their thirties, all of whom I had known when they were in nursery school—a time when I thought a lot about the differences between mothering my daughter and my son. I found myself appraising them as a woman: tall, handsome, undeniably men now. What kind of men had they turned out to be? This poem might be expressed as a wish, but I think about it the way I think of most of my poems, as an inquiry.

 

As to the poetics, I was deeply influenced by Marvin Bell, himself a man of great kindness and generosity when I studied with him. Marvin always urged me towards what he called “wild writing,” and while I have never abandoned a certain clarity, I like to think that a few risks in this poem would have made him smile. I happen to be reading collections by Ada Limón and Marie Howe at the moment, but I’m also translating a Polish-born Yiddish poet named Rajzel Żychlińsky whose early work was influenced by surrealism. That kind of mixture is typical for me and, I’m sure, finds its way into the variety of ways I write.

 

—Susan Cohen

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Katherine Gekker

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Death Metal Supernova

 

Dressed like Siouxsie Sioux, torn fishnet

tights, raccoon eyes outlined in black, 

Lucy swigs codeine cough syrup on our way 

 

to the 9:30 Club. My jacket’s nickel zippers 

match my single piercing. Maybe tonight I’ll 

finally be ready to mosh to the Bad Brains.

 

I already know how to stomp around.

Inside the 9:30, our hands stamped, I 

warn Lucy — Be careful. Or — Better not.

 

Hardcore rockers bark speed metal death 

growls, berserks shred guitars, destroy 

drums. Skull tattoos curl around biceps. 

 

Some nights someone from the band plucks 

a fanboy or fangirl, or both, from the mosh 

pit. A few hours later, kicks them out 

 

of the Hotel Harrington, their faces, memories 

smudged. 

                 I lean against the club’s back 

wall, a mute punk supernumerary, too afraid 

 

to yell, too afraid of my anger, my own voice. 

In death metal thrashes, I hear the violins 

in Vivaldi’s “Winter,” Schubert’s final 

 

string quartet. I miss my family, my quiet 

home. It’s so hard to be bad. Later, I drive 

too fast, steer with my knees, elbows. One 

 

hand covers an eye so I won’t see double, 

the other hand clutches an amber pint. 

Lucy shouts faster faster.

                                         Years ago, when 

​

we were in 7th grade, we watched a science 

documentary about the universe. That night, 

Lucy & I lay on top of my picnic bench, 

​

our backs against splintered wood. We 

looked up at the sky. Lucy said — 

Let’s talk about infinity, how far 

​

the light of ancient stars travels to reach us, 

how much time it takes till we can see it.

​

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Music is a thread vibrating through my life and my poetry — from Schubert to the Bad Brains to opera. Right now, I’m listening to George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children, a piece I return to often. Included in its instruments are a toy piano and prayer stones. The vocalizations, that in some cases can’t even be called words or words we would recognize as words, are sometimes sung into a piano, creating vibrations. The text is taken from Federico García Lorca’s poems and his play, Yerma. In “Death Metal Supernova,” Lucy embodies herself, as well as standing in for many of my childhood friends. I think of what Lorca wrote — “close to the stars… give me back the soul I had...when I was a child.”

 

—Katherine Gekker

 

Susan Haifleigh 

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​

You’ll Know it in Your Bones

 

The song has been sung 

forever, humming its way

through deep blue veins 

traveling back to their origin. 

 

Some say it’s a heartbeat, 

singing through the vibrating 

roots of ancient trees,

 

others say it’s a whale song 

gliding under the watery depths, 

reverberating in the rocks and silt 

moving inside mineralized earth.

 

We feel it, tapping our bare feet 

on the floorboards of eternity 

moving down the family line,

like a story told over and over. 

 

You know it in your bones 

memory no longer required,

you recognize it every day 

by listening, the background tune

 

that catches your ear making the hair 

on your the neck stand stark straight 

quivering with anticipation.

 

Familiar, but not discernible, 

slightly melancholy, unexpectedly

invigorating, it pulls you forward 

arms lifting, body swaying

 

head falling back, mouth relaxing, 

finding yourself in a slow spin 

skirts lifting like gauzy 

curtains catching the breeze.

 

Just after the sun takes its leave,

you will find yourself humming,

the tune just under your breath,  

wondering where you first heard it.

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The sacred has always held deep fascination for me and appears regularly in my writing. Maybe because I come from a long line of eight generations of ministers, and I believe that our DNA continues to move and inform us. This poem was written in my regular Sunday writing class, which we lovingly call “Word Church” during a thirteen-minute write. The class theme was Ancestral Song, and the prompt was “describe a time in your life when the songs of your ancestors came back to you.” After I wrote it, I knew intuitively that it was true and that it rose from a place that resonates in my heart. I also knew my ancestors could be defined more broadly as everyone who has ever lived and everyone who will ever live. I love knowing their song continuously runs through me and keeps me connected to what really matters. My journey so far could be summarized by the quote:

 

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ~ E.M. Forster

 

Trained as an architect, I consider myself slightly retired. I started writing poetry during the early part of the Covidpandemic and haven’t stopped since. The fact that I could even write poetry was a revelation and a gift. Besides my regular class, I’ve been in The Stafford Challenge since its inception and haven’t missed a single day of writing one poem in over seven hundred and fifty days. I keep writing because I must. What began as a lark is now my daily sustenance and has transformed my life, made it more contemplative, taught me to value and protect my time, and the importance of making space for creativity.

 

—Susan Haifleigh

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Wendell Hawken

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Touch 

 

At the Virginia State Fair, a kid in Air Jordans 

his corn-rowed sister in tow,

 

breathless from his run to where I hold 

our granddaughter’s groomed show calf, 

 

Hey lady, can I touch your horse?

 

Okay but up here where she can see you. 

 

He lays his hand, fingers spread, 

in the manner of a blessing, boy to calf, 

 

then his other hand like she’s an ancient 

cave wall. He smiles deep creases

 

as his sister hangs back, hugging 

her distrust to her chest. 

 

But she’s a cow, not a horse. 

 

He nods, eyes remote, his nose now at her neck 

breathing in the calf’s sweet grass skin.  

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Our calf Sprinkle was champion Hereford heifer at the Virginia State Fair and this poem’s moment was another win that day. My father used to say, you don’t have to ruin a good story with the truth, but this poem’s interaction happened just the way I tell it.  

 

As I walk my dogs around the farm, run errands, and live my rural life, my poetry radar stays on. And every morning, I write. Certain noticed moments, or memorable phrases, convert quickly; others take years. As “Touch” did. Decades, even. And some scraps never get out of the folder. I try to cultivate music with my words, and most of my poems contain strong narrative elements. Musical narrative. I am drawn to poets with similar inclinations. Like the late Ellen Bryant Voigt, a true master, and Elizabeth Bishop, both of whom blend accessibility with wonder and mystery. Right now, I’m reading, and sitting with, Brian Teare’s Doomstead Days having, for now, just finished m.s. RedCherries’ mother. I also get a morning emailed infusion of excellent poetry from Daily Rattle (tim@rattle.com) out here on a grass farm in the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where three dogs lie beside me when I write. 

 

—Wendell Hawken

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Sharon Hoffman

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Marriage

 

The day I came home from open-heart surgery,
my husband and I argued.
You need to rest, he said.
I need to wash, I insisted.
I would not put a clean nightgown on this body
that had been trapped in a hospital bed
for ten days and nights.
He had a change of heart.
He helped me to the shower chair.
He helped me undress.
He took his clothes off.
He knelt before me on the cold, hard tiles.
He washed my body, the most intimate places.
I could not raise my arms more than shoulder high,
so he washed my hair.
It was difficult even then – we are old, 

our bones brittle, our joints aching – 

but he knelt there. 

He knelt there. 

 

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I think it was inevitable that I would become a writer. I have an older cousin who has told me that even at four or five I was the storyteller of the family. 

 

Both my father and his mother wrote poetry sometimes, and I have a 19th century ancestor who was a poet who published truly, truly dreadful poems. He was a Scotsman who knew Burns, and naturally I wish I were descended from Burns himself instead.

 

I was lucky to grow up with lots of books in the house, although the poetry books were mostly old anthologies. I read Wyatt, Marvell, Donne, Yeats and so on. I didn't really have access to contemporary poets, particularly women poets, until my early teens. Because of this, my voice does not always sound very contemporary.

 

In general, I tend to write long -- a page and a half or even two -- with a rather rolling Whitmanesque rhythm underlying the poems. This poem, "Marriage," is different from my usual work. I have a wonderful editor, my best friend of 40 years, who helped me shape it so that its form matched its surface meaning -- a very spare poem, brusque, with short, direct phrases, like the coldness of the hospital and the tiled shower. 

 

I wanted that coldness to be set in contrast to the underlying warmth of the subject matter --

the vulnerability and sacrificial love between people who have cared for one another for long years. I hope I succeeded.

 

—Sharon Hoffman

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Erin Jamieson

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Second Skin

 

I tie your shirt around my waist, flannel fabric both too soft and too coarse, draping over me like

a second skin that I could wear forever, just to remind me, that once, we danced on these plank

floors in lonely rooms in the glow of a salvaged microwave, trying to find our own light even as 

            

shadows kept entering 

 

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I’m always drawn to poetry that evokes emotion - that connects our interior worlds to external worlds. Poetry has an ability to show how we are connected through shared humanity - and to pull back and expose the systems that seek to oppress human rights. Claudia Rankine, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, and Isaac Pickell are a few of my favorite poets. I also spent some time studying and admiring T.S. Eliot as well as many French poets - Charles Baudelaire and his contemporaries. I am trying to expand what I read and just finished a haunting memoir, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (Sehee). On my TBR is A Sea of Unspoken Things by Adrienne Young, and I want to find some emerging poets.

 

—Erin Jamieson

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Melanie McCabe

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Calculating Risk

 

Imagine I balance on the tip of my finger 

a wine glass of Baccarat crystal.

Watch as it ricochets light while I dance 

a fandango across the impossibly white linen, 

as it wobbles on the swirls of my skin.

 

Linger and you might marvel as I juggle 

blue porcelain teacups and saucers 

from the Ming Dynasty or milky unstrung 

pearls that arc the glow of August stars 

into my blooming and closing fists.

 

Beat time as though I tap rhythm sticks 

along a marimba of resurrected bones, 

a Triassic mystery reassembled with tweezers, 

magnifying lenses, clenched muscles 

and tiny beads of sweat.

 

Ride shotgun with me in a bullet-- perhaps 

a shiny Porsche Carrera. Sharp-knuckle as I take 

each turn with only nerve, tightening

biceps to tip the wheel.  Do not pull 

the scarf from my eyes.

 

Yes, of course, I see the end of all of it.

Of us. I hear the splintering jangle of glass, zags

flaking splinters of paint, bones snapping to powder.  

I see steel and chrome root in a shagged oak tree. 

The next day’s sad news clipping.

 

Point, if you must, to my scars, but note also 

the unmapped valley behind each knee, the isthmus 

at the back of my neck. Stay. Watch. We are not yet 

done for. Come closer and cup your hands to catch

what is only now beginning to break.

​

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I have been composing poetry since I was very young. My father was a writer and loved to engage me in rhyming games—he’d give me a first line and I had to reply with a second, and back and forth we’d go. As a moony adolescent, I gravitated to poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale, and came late to the realization that poems needn’t rhyme.

 

A professor in an undergrad poetry workshop encouraged me to apply to the MFA program he had graduated from. I was so clueless, I didn’t realize there were dozens of these programs, and when I didn’t get into that one, I gave up, absolutely crushed, and ended up working in advertising.

 

When I decided to become a teacher after my fortieth birthday, I entered a grad program that required that I take one elective in my chosen discipline—English. And that led me back into a poetry workshop and from there, into an MFA program where I was the oldest in my cohort by a couple of decades.

 

I was so nervous about not being counted out because of my age, each week when we were expected to bring in a poem, I would have two in my folder, just in case at the last minute I decided my first choice wasn’t good enough. Consequently, after I graduated, I had a file drawer brimming with poems no one had ever seen.

 

Since I began writing prose—first, a memoir and now, my debut novel—I found I was writing less poetry, but I didn’t want to leave poetry behind me. So I began going through those old files, taking out poems that seemed to have potential, and revising them until I was satisfied. “Calculating Risk” is one of those poems.

 

—Melanie McCabe

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Karen McPherson

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I Love Her Sharp

 

I love her sharp as a sea urchin 

in a crystal pool, mountain peak slashing 

the blue silk scarf of sky, the needle prick 

that wakes the queen. 

 

I love her shrill high note that makes 

the icicle fall and shatter.

 

I love her brittle as the splintered edge 

of a New England winter pond. 

 

         When a cloudy swirl swallows her edges

I miss her keenly.

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These days we are living and writing in and of crisis. Witnessing atrocities. Grieving. Raging. Struggling against despair. And somehow poetry matters. The poems I’m needing most these days dwell in a shadow place where dark meets light, leaning into our world’s fragility and resilience. 

 

The voices of three poets have been particularly important to me this past year. These three are, for me, generous poets of tenderness. I keep returning to Inger Christensen’s alphabet in Susanna Nied’s remarkable translation. These poems insist on being read aloud, and they are stunning in their scope, their delicacy, and their insight. Ada Limón has been my inspiration for years. This past fall I loved listening to her interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” where she spoke about “Writing in Uncertain Times.” (I also love that she referred to the collective noun for a group of poems as a startlement!) I have these lines from her poem “Startlement” on my bulletin board: “We know now, // we were never at the circle’s center, instead / all around us something is living or trying to live. / The world says, What we are becoming, we are / becoming together.” The third poet who accompanies me constantly and closely is Liz Ahl. A Case for Solace is probably the book that I find myself turning to most often these days. Ahl’s poems of intimacy, grief, human connection, sorrow, and love make the case for solace and themselves offer that solace at a time when we need it so badly. 

 

“I Love Her Sharp” is my love poem to the woman who has been sharing my life for decades. It speaks of brilliance and sharp edges and vulnerabilities. Perhaps most of all it speaks of human tenderness. 

 

—Karen McPherson

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Camille Norvaisas

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Shark Pup Hatches in Aquarium Tank with No Males

 

I've hidden your sperm. Not in the back of the sock drawer

or a wood box under the loose floorboard

of the room with the heirloom rug you always hated.

 

No, you won't find it like some stash of cash 

inside the freezer box of Santa Fe style rice and beans

or taped under the toilet tank lid like in an old gangster movie.

 

Instead, it's tucked inside the ductwork of my own body

and like a magician pulling a cloak from an empty bird cage

you too will gasp at the white dove waiting inside.

 

 

*title inspired by UPI Odd News Feb 3, 2025

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Inspired by the Frederick Buechner quote, "Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." I am often drawn to vivid images, interactions, memories, or snippets of history that are beautiful or terrible. And if I'm truly aware, exploring the beauty in the terrifying–the glow and the ache. My poems are largely free verse with a focus on clear image, a delight in sound-play, and an honest voice. Lately I've been engrossed in how generational trauma moves through bloodlines, professing newfound love in the latter half of my years, and looking to nature as a place of belonging, refuge, and enchantment. 

 

“Shark Pup Hatches in Aquarium with No Males,” emerged from a prompt to write about a current news story. Weary of political chaos, I searched for something gentler and stumbled on a February 3, 2025, UPI Odd News report, that a baby swell shark was born in an aquarium with only female sharks. After learning the sharks can clone themselves or delay fertilization, I felt compelled to express my delight (with an edge of defiance) in this poem. Nature's adaptability is humbling.

 

—Camille Norvaisas

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Rebecca Pelky

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What it’s like being childless at 50

 

It’s like the guy at the laundromat,

my age or maybe a little older, pointing 

at a warm sock I’ve let drop 

to the warped linoleum, 

saying he didn’t think my “little one”

would be happy running around 

with only one sock, proving

he knows nothing about children.

Or about me. 

 

But there’s a compliment in there 

somewhere. Or maybe it’s just 

a skewed view of the faces of women 

 

at 50. It’s like the teen cashier at Target

bubbling about how my grandkid will be

so excited about the Star Wars Lego set

she unlocks for me. I smile tightly at her 

young assumption, and I keep my thoughts 

and my Legos for myself. 

 

But seriously, it’s like at my age, no one

can imagine my existence without offspring,

like even though I’m standing in front of them

alone, they see ghosts around me, small hands

clutching at everything I never wanted to be. 

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I think of my poems as acts of gathering (or sometimes a scavenger hunt is more apt), and I write because I can’t ever seem to put down the basket, as it were. I usually have clusters of vignettes shuffling around in my brain, but I don’t have a poem until I find that one last thing that finally makes everything fit. At the same time, I can’t let go of those moments until I can get them on paper. Once recently, that last thing was an osprey in the sky after a snowstorm. Although the poem wasn’t about the osprey, I still needed it to soar through the poem before everything else made sense. Sometimes that last thing is a news story or another unusual interaction. I love making connections between things that might not seem connected at first glance. 

 

I’m most in awe of other Indigenous poets who also make connections in their poems—to history or archival documents or traditional Native art forms—or who are playing in the connective tissue between genres. Jennifer Foerster’s Leaving Tulsa, Heid E. Erdrich’s Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media, and Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run, are a few that come to mind. 

 

—Rebecca Pelky

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Renee Rossi

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Contemplating Why a Weed Is a Flower in the Wrong Place

 

I try to witness several springs each year,

this time gorging on azaleas’ and rhododendrons’ fuchsias

brought out by the grey skies of the UK,

its yellow poppies growing in limestone cracks.

 

I gorge on azaleas and rhododendrons 

believed to guard entrance to the world of the dead,

and yellow poppies growing in limestone cracks;

garden escapees who colonized after the glaciers

 

to guard the entrance to the world of the dead.

What do I know of the earthly struggles of

garden escapees who colonized after the glaciers,

after the wear and tear of occupation?

 

What do I know of earthly struggles

as I return home to dandelions in my yard

alive after the wear and tear of occupation? 

Next door, tent encampments sprout up. Free Palestine.

 

I return home to dandelions in my yard,

a dead mouse floats belly up in the toilet

and next door, tent encampments to Free Palestine

at the smallest college campus in America.

 

A dead mouse floats belly up in the toilet.

I flush it down without another thought

about the smallest college campus in America

or the aftermath of years of colonial rule.

 

Yes, I flush it down without another thought

as to why flowers can be so apolitical

or how, despite years of colonial rule,

dandelions are masters of survival.

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I meditate on impermanence and acceptance. One of my favorite lines is that of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche: “Belief in anything is an attempt to label the mystery.” I spent years working in medicine, appreciating that any life force is an absolute gift and that there are so many forces working at any point against us: entropy, genetics, natural disasters, not to mention human-created disasters. I remember how Yuval Noah Harari noted that Homo sapiens are the “deadliest species in the annals of life.” So, the sheer persistence of any species is remarkable and something to be celebrated as I have tried to do in my poem “Contemplating Why a Weed Is a Flower in the Wrong Place.” I am also intrigued by circularity and recurring themes, even to the point of obsession, and the pantoum form works well for this.

 

Currently, I am rereading Lucie Brock-Broido’s Trouble in Mind with its baroque language and obsessions and, though her poetry is so different from mine, I find comfort in her precise diction and voice. Other poets I have been reading recently are Natalie Diaz and John Yau, especially for inspiration. I am also reading The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works by the physicist Helen Czerski and acquainting myself with the inner workings of the ocean that I was utterly unfamiliar with, and how much it influences our daily lives and the life of the planet. 

 

I never know where a poem will come from: it seems a confluence of events that creates the spark. When I am a bit lost personally to express something, I “write” found poems, cobbling together other’s words in a fresh way to create something that may vibrate at a different frequency.

 

—Renee Rossi

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Joannie Stangeland

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In the Year the Planes Start Sobbing

 

 

My mother sleeps more, slow departure

for a beyond blurred and brilliant,

 

the word afterlife like a jet ascending

toward Nome or Fort Lauderdale.

 

On the flight path, the sound of someone leaving

starts to sound like crying. Not every time.

 

Not a reliable grief. Haunting

like the whirr electric cars make, that noise

 

added so you can hear their hurry

before you begin to cross the street. 

 

Desolation on the road, in the air.

When I visit, my mother mumbles

 

dream language, jostled in sleep’s turbulence. 

One day, a lone tear slides down her face

 

like a trail to thoughts I cannot follow.

At a party, I ask about the plane sobs.

 

My son, an engineer, shrugs, mentions flaps.

Someone else suggests the Doppler effect.

 

I become the strange mother at the table, nursing

my gin and tonic, no smooth landing in sight.

 

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I want a poem that sounds like a poem, a space for the reader to rest or dance in. I return often to the poems of Louise Glück, Lynda Hull, Oliver de la Paz, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Martha Silano, Deborah Digges, and Rick Barot. When writing a poem, I tend to lean on the sounds, working to balance the music, the lyrical image, and a narrative or multiple narratives that tangle or untangle.

 

Grief has haunted my poems since the passing of my first husband. My parents’ declines were a different loss. At some point in 2024, I started hearing strange sounds from the planes overhead. After living in this house under the flight path for decades, why now? 

 

When leaving the party at the end of “In the Year the Planes Start Sobbing,” I said I would record the plane sounds and send them. Suddenly, I couldn't hear the cries. Or the keening happened too quickly for me to get my phone. I then tried Google, but it did not help. In lieu of research or the promised recording, I decided to write a poem. Most of the images, and some others, arrived in the first free write. The subsequent drafts became an exercise in what to leave out (my father, who is in other poems; the Blue Angels), what to keep, and how to distill it to create this space for you.

 

—Joannie Stangeland

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Rebecca Ullrich

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A Brief History of Eternity

 

driving south in New Mexico dusk hanging off the steep-sided mesa

from Los Alamos pointing down and out, nothing between forever

and here but a huge moon in fading blue with the pink crushing in

 

feeling the grit along the top edge of the brass plaque on the cremation

wall in late August sunlight, faded plastic peonies from Memorial Day

hot in a small vase hooked next to Mom’s name set in white marble

 

hearing a choir at St. Paul’s, London pounding rain outside, angels

soaring indoors up to the stained glass and reflecting from the dome

crystal sound pure as a broken heart’s bite, pure as full nothing

 

catching the steady newborn stare of preemie eyes deepening blue

to be brown if the tapes and tubes and cords and needles ever finish

if the steady pulse continues, if he sees what he needs in this review

 

bursting laughter rolling up the table with a fruit salad so fresh

the fuzz still stands up on the velvet peach slices and the grapes

pop juice across the quickest of tongues at this hardwood board

 

waking in storm crash, light burst outlining window, dresser, door

then cutting to black, thunder still grumbling, bouncing against cloud

cover’s edge, and I reach out across silked cotton to your not-there

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From the soothing heal of Mary Oliver through the challenges flung by Tony Hoagland, I just enjoy poetry. I love the pull and tug of each line, the sounds I have to say out loud, the clever turns and enjambments that make me go back and read again. I love the private unburied and the foolish choices challenged. I write because I have always written, but I write poetry because of the possibility of exploring and discovering myself in all of my connections to everything else. I am a historian by training and trade, so tying the bits and pieces of past to present seems urgent to me, seems a way into understanding all of those connections. 

 

—Rebecca Ullrich

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Patricia Watts

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Oh, Penny

 

Discarded in a parking lot, you lie in a bed of expended

cigarettes, your skin burned, your mettle tarnished by touch.

 

How far you’ve fallen from the days you reigned in my jar

of change, color and clink of the copper queen so distinct from the rest. 

 

Your face full as the Harvest Moon, your small bounty round

as a platter. Count your pennies, the grown-ups said. And I did.

 

You amounted to something. One of you for a piece of bubblegum,

so fun in the mouth. Another tossed in a fountain, a small price

 

for a wish. Tell me, Penny, when the world stopped

banking on your luck. Tell me how it is they all pass by

 

kicking you in the dust. Oh Penny, my jingle’s gone, my luster

lost. On spent knee I bend and lift you up.

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Some of the best advice I’ve received as a writer is to read widely, not only in the genre of choice but in all genres. Most nights, my nightstand overflows with poetry, fiction, cookbooks, a magazine or two, and whatever I picked up at one of the Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood, such as the Book of North American Birds which—even without birdsong--is a lyrical delight (“strident, steely notes”) and home to lines that could be plucked into a poem (“Birds are no respecters of international boundaries”).

 

Poetry-wise, I’m reading Joy Harjo’s Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years. I have long been in awe of her work, her ability to speak a people’s heartache and hope. It’s a delight to come across some of my old favorites (“She Had Some Horses” and “Deer Dancer”) along with her newer work. The notes section at the end of the book—which she so generously offers--provides a privileged look into each poem’s story of creation.

 

My poem “Oh, Penny” likely got its start more than fifty years ago with the sound of pennies jingling in my pocket as I walked to school, and I return to the subject matter not just for a nostalgic look back but also as a witness to the downtrodden and de-valued, those—then and now--who find themselves without currency.

 

—Patricia Watts

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